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. (shrink)

If all dependent expressions were adjacent some variety of immediate constituent analysis would suffice for grammar, but syntactic and semantic mismatches are characteristic of natural language; indeed this is a, or the, central problem in grammar. Logical categorial grammar reduces grammar to logic: an expression is well-formed if and only if an associated sequent is a theorem of a categorial logic. The paradigmatic categorial logic is the Lambek calculus, but being a logic of concatenation the Lambek calculus can only capture (...) discontinuous dependencies when they are peripheral. In this paper we present the displacement calculus, which is a logic of intercalation as well as concatenation and which subsumes the Lambek calculus. On the empirical side, we apply the new calculus to discontinuous idioms, quantification, VP ellipsis, medial extraction, pied-piping, appositive relativisation, parentheticals, gapping, comparative subdeletion, cross-serial dependencies, reflexivization, anaphora, dative alternation, and particle shift. On the technical side, we prove that the calculus enjoys Cut-elimination. (shrink)

In this paper we compare grammatical inference in the context of simple and of mixed Lambek systems. Simple Lambek systems are obtained by taking the logic of residuation for a family of multiplicative connectives /, *, \, together with a package of structural postulates characterizing the resource management properties of the * connective. Different choices for Associativity and Commutativity yield the familiar logics NL, L, NLP, LP. Semantically, a simple Lambek system is a unimodal logic: the connectives get a Kripke (...) style interpretation in terms of a single ternary accessibility relation modeling the notion of linguistic composition for each individual system.The simple systems each have their virtues in linguistic analysis. But none of them in isolation provides a basis for a full theory of grammar. In the second part of the paper, we consider two types of mixed Lambek systems.The first type is obtained by combining a number of unimodal systems into one multimodal logic. The combined multimodal logic is set up in such a way that the individual resource management properties of the constituting logics are preserved. But the inferential capacity of the mixed logic is greater than the sum of its component parts through the addition of interaction postulates, together with the corresponding interpretive constraints on frames, regulating the communication between the component logics.The second type of mixed system is obtained by generalizing the residuation scheme for binary connectives to families of n-ary connectives, and by putting together families, of different arities in one logic. We focus on residuation for unary connectives, hence on mixed frames, as these already represent the complexities in full. We prove a number of elementary logical results for unary families of residuated connectives and their combination with binary families. The existing proposals for unary ‘structural modalities’ are situated within this general framework, and a number of new linguistic applications is given. (shrink)

Categorial grammar is well-known for its elegant analysis of coordination enabled by the flexible notion of constituency it entertains. However, to date, no systematic study exists that examines whether this analysis has any obvious empirical advantage over alternative analyses of nonconstituent coordination available in phrase structure-based theories of syntax. This paper attempts precisely such a comparison. We compare the direct constituent coordination analysis of non-canonical coordinations in categorial grammar with an ellipsis-based analysis of the same phenomena in the recent HPSG (...) literature. We provide a set of empirical evidence, consisting of cases in which non-canonical coordinations interact with scopal operators of various sorts, which systematically falsifies the predictions of the latter, ‘linearization-based’ ellipsis approach to coordination. We propose an alternative analysis in a variant of categorial grammar called Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar. The proposed framework builds on both the Lambek-inspired variants of categorial grammar and a more recent line of work modelling word order via a lambda calculus for the prosodic component. The flexible syntax–semantics interface of this framework straightforwardly captures the interactions between non-canonical coordinations and scopal expressions, demonstrating the broader empirical payoff of the direct constituent coordination analysis of non-canonical coordinations pioneered by Steedman :523–568, 1985; Linguist Philos 13:207–263, 1990) and Dowty hitherto not explicitly recognized in the literature. (shrink)

Some formal properties of enriched systems of Lambek calculus with analogues of conjunction and disjunction are investigated. In particular, it is proved that the class of languages recognizable by the Lambek calculus with added intersective conjunction properly includes the class of finite intersections of context-free languages.

There is no doubt that the model presented here is incomplete. Many important categories, particularly negation and the adverbials, have been entirely ignored, and the treatment of Tense and the affixes is certainly inadequate. It also remains to be seen how the many constructions that have been ignored here are to be accommodated within the framework that has been outlined. However, the fact that a standard categorial lexicon, plus the four rule schemata, seems to come close to exhaustively specifying the (...) main clause constructions of English, and also seems to explain a number of major constraints on transformations, encourages us to compare the theory with certain alternatives, and to examine its broader implications. (shrink)

Language in Action demonstrates the viability of mathematical research into the foundations of categorial grammar, a topic at the border between logic and linguistics. Since its initial publication it has become the classic work in the foundations of categorial grammar. A new introduction to this paperback edition updates the open research problems and records relevant results through pointers to the literature. Van Benthem presents the categorial processing of syntax and semantics as a central component in a more general dynamic logic (...) of information flow, in tune with computational developments in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Using the paradigm of categorial grammar, he describes the substructural logics driving the dynamics of natural language syntax and semantics. This is a general type-theoretic approach that lends itself easily to proof-theoretic and semantic studies in tandem with standard logic. The emphasis is on a broad landscape of substructural categorial logics and their proof-theoretical and semantic peculiarities. This provides a systematic theory for natural language understanding, admitting of significant mathematical results. Moreover, the theory makes possible dynamic interpretations that view natural languages as programming formalisms for various cognitive activities. (shrink)

The book, which stepwise develops successively more powerful logical and grammatical systems, covers an unusually broad range of material.

This book takes concepts developed by researchers in theoretical computer science and adapts and applies them to the study of natural language meaning. Summarizing over a decade of research, Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan put forward the Continuation Hypothesis: that the meaning of a natural language expression can depend on its own continuation.

The paper develops Lambda Grammars, a form of categorial grammar that, unlike other categorial formalisms, is non-directional. Linguistic signs are represented as sequences of lambda terms and are combined with the help of linear combinators.