An application of the syntactic method to recognition of electrocardiogram (ECG) and to the measurement of ECG parameters is presented. Solutions to the subproblems of primitive pattern selection, primitive pattern extraction, linguistic representation, and pattern grammar formulation are given. Attribute grammars are used as the model for the pattern grammar because of their descriptive power, which is due to their ability to handle syntactic as well as semantic information. This approach has been implemented and the performanc e of the resultant system has been evaluated using an annotated standard ECG library. e of the resultant system has been evaluated using an annotated standard ECG library.