The importance of reductions in operator grammar is that they separate sentences that contain reduced forms from those that don’t (base sentences). All reductions are paraphrases, since they do not remove any information, just make sentences more compact. Thus, the base sentences contain all the information of the language and the reduced sentences are variants of these. Base sentences are made up of simple words without modifiers and largely without affixes, e.g. "snow falls", "sheep eat grass", "John knows sheep eat grass", "that sheep eat snow surprises John".