The Logic Of Categorial Grammars

This book is intended for students in computer science, formal linguistics, mathematical logic and to colleagues interested in categorial grammars and their logical foundations. These lecture notes present categorial grammars as deductive systems, in the approach called parsing-as-deduction, and the book includes detailed proofs of their main properties. The papers are organized in topical sections on AB grammars, Lambek’s syntactic calculus, Lambek calculus and montague grammar, non-associative Lambek calculus, multimodal Lambek calculus, Lambek calculus, linear logic and proof nets and proof nets for the multimodal Lambek calculus.

This book sets out the foundations, methodology, and practice of a formal framework for the description of language. The approach embraces the trends of lexicalism and compositional semantics in computational linguistics, and theoretical linguistics more broadly, by developing categorial grammar into a powerful and extendable logic of signs. Taking Montague Grammar as its point of departure, the book explains how integration of methods from philosophy (logical semantics), computer science (type theory), linguistics (categorial grammar) and meta-mathematics (mathematical logic ) provides a categorial foundation with coverage including intensionality, quantification, featural polymorphism, domains and constraints. For the first time, the book systematises categorial thinking into a unified program which is at once both logically secured, and a practical tool for pure lexical grammar development with type-theoretic semantics. It should be of interest to all those active in computational linguistics and formal grammar and is suitable for use at advanced undergraduate, postgraduate, and research levels.

In the last few years categorial grammars have been the focus of dramatically expanded interest and activity, both theoretical and computational. This book, the first introduction to categorical grammars, is written as an objective critical assessment. Categorial grammars offer a radical alternative to the phrase-structure paradigm, with deep roots in the philosophy of language, logic and algebra. Mary McGee Wood outlines their historical evolution and discusses their formal basis, starting with a quasi-canonical core and considering a number of possible extensions. She also explores their treatment of a number of linguistic phenomena, including passives, raising, discontinuous dependencies and non-constituent coordination, as well as such general issues as word order, logic, psychological plausibility and parsing. This introduction to categorial grammars will be of interest to final year undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in current theories of grammar, including comparative, descriptive, and computational linguistics.

For the most part, the papers collected in this volume stern from presentations given at a conference held in Tucson over the weekend of May 31 through June 2, 1985. We wish to record our gratitude to the participants in that conference, as well as to the National Science Foundation (Grant No. BNS-8418916) and the University of Arizona SBS Research Institute for their financial support. The advice we received from Susan Steele on organizational matters proved invaluable and had many felicitous consequences for the success of the con­ ference. We also would like to thank the staff of the Departments of Linguistics of the University of Arizona and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for their help, as weIl as a number of individuals, including Lin Hall, Kathy Todd, and Jiazhen Hu, Sandra Fulmer, Maria Sandoval, Natsuko Tsujimura, Stuart Davis, Mark Lewis, Robin Schafer, Shi Zhang, Olivia Oehrle-Steele, and Paul Saka. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Martin Scrivener, our editor, for his patience and his encouragement. Vll INTRODUCTION The term 'categorial grammar' was introduced by Bar-Rillel (1964, page 99) as a handy way of grouping together some of his own earlier work (1953) and the work of the Polish logicians and philosophers Lesniewski (1929) and Ajdukiewicz (1935), in contrast to approaches to linguistic analysis based on phrase structure grammars.

This book provides a state-of-the-art introduction to categorial grammar, a type of formal grammar which analyses expressions as functions or according to a function-argument relationship. The book's focus is on linguistic, computational, and psycholinguistic aspects of logical categorial grammar, i.e. enriched Lambek Calculus. Glyn Morrill opens with the history and notation of Lambek Calculus and its application to syntax, semantics, and processing. Successive chapters extend the grammar to a number of significant syntactic and semantic properties of natural language. The final part applies Morrill's account to several current issues in processing and parsing, considered from both a psychological and a computational perspective. The book offers a rigorous and thoughtful study of one of the main lines of research in the formal and mathematical theory of grammar, and will be suitable for students of linguistics and cognitive science from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

In the last few years categorial grammars have been the focus of dramatically expanded interest and activity, both theoretical and computational. This book, the first introduction to categorical grammars, is written as an objective critical assessment. Categorial grammars offer a radical alternative to the phrase-structure paradigm, with deep roots in the philosophy of language, logic and algebra. Mary McGee Wood outlines their historical evolution and discusses their formal basis, starting with a quasi-canonical core and considering a number of possible extensions. She also explores their treatment of a number of linguistic phenomena, including passives, raising, discontinuous dependencies and non-constituent coordination, as well as such general issues as word order, logic, psychological plausibility and parsing. This introduction to categorial grammars will be of interest to final year undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in current theories of grammar, including comparative, descriptive, and computational linguistics.

This book is devoted to the mathematical foundations of categorial grammar including type-theoretic foundations of mathematics, grammatical categories and other topics related to categorial grammar and to philosophical and linguistic applications of this framework. The volume consists of three parts. The first, introductory part, contains the editor's addresses and two survey chapters concerning the history (W. Marciszewski) and current trends of the discipline (J.van Benthem). The second part consists of 10 chapters devoted to categorial grammar proper, and the third part 7 chapters devoted to areas close to categorial grammar. Most of the contributions are original papers, but five of them are reprints of classics (M.J. Cresswell, P.T. Geach, H. Hiz, J. Lambek, T. Potts).

No detailed description available for "Categorial Investigations".

Based on an introductory course on natural-language semantics, this book provides an introduction to type-logical grammar and the range of linguistic phenomena that can be handled in categorial grammar. It also contains a great deal of original work on categorial grammar and its application to natural-language semantics. The author chose the type-logical categorial grammar as his grammatical basis because of its broad syntactic coverage and its strong linkage of syntax and semantics. Although its basic orientation is linguistic, the book should also be of interest to logicians and computer scientists seeking connections between logical systems and natural language. The book, which stepwise develops successively more powerful logical and grammatical systems, covers an unusually broad range of material. Topics covered include higher-order logic, applicative categorial grammar, the Lambek calculus, coordination and unbounded dependencies, quantifiers and scope, plurals, pronouns and dependency, modal logic, intensionality, and tense and aspect. The book contains more mathematical development than is usually found in texts on natural language; an appendix includes the basic mathematical concepts used throughout the book.