The GRAphe Fonctionnel de Commande Étapes Transitions (GRAFCET) is a powerful graphical modeling language for the pecification of controllers in discrete event systems.It uses expressions to express the conditions of transitions and conditional actions as well as the logical and arithmetic expressions assigned to stored actions. However, several research works has focused on the transformation of Grafcet specifications (including expressions) into control code for embedded systems. To make it easier to edit valid Grafcet models and generate code, it is necessary to propose a formalization of the Grafcet expression language permitting to validate its constructs and provide an appropriate semantics. For this, we propose a context-free grammar that generates the whole set of Grafcet expressions, by extending the usual grammars of logical and arithmetic expressions. We also propose a metamodel and an associated semantics of Grafcet expressions to facilitate the implementation of the Grafcet language. A parser of the expressions Grafcet emph G7Expr is then obtained thanks to the generator of parsers ANTLR, while the metamodel is implemented in the Eclipse EMF Model Driven Engineering (MDE) environment. The combination of the two tools makes it possible to analyze and automatically build Grafcet expressions when editing and synthesizing Grafcet models.