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I understand BNF notation; I just can't translate it at a glance into something more linguistic (like, say, X' syntax). I can translate it only laboriously. And because my thinking is based in linguistics rather than computer science, I can only understand the syntax once it is translated into linguistic terms. Human language syntax is based on combinatorial properties of words, and exocentric phrases, if they exist at all, do not occur willynilly.
In practice, this just means that to comprehend your proposals, I'd have to sit down and translate them into a formalism that makes sense to me, and that takes more time than I have at the moment, what with me no longer being on holiday. It doesn't mean you've been too brief or cryptic. If you did want to translate into a formalism easy for me to grock, then I'd say: assume, as far as possible, that (i) there is no syntagmatic relation other than an asymmetric complement-of relation, and (ii) all nodes are terminal (or, all phrases are endocentric).