This thesis presents accounts of a range of linguistic phenomena in an extended categorial framework, and develops proposals for processing grammars set within this framework. Linguistic phenomena whose treatment we address include word order, grammatical relations and obliqueness, extraction and island constraints, and binding. The work is set within a flexible categorial framework which is a version of the Lambek calculus (Lambek, 1958) extended by the inclusion of additional type-forming operators whose logical behaviour allows for the characterization of some aspect of linguistic phenomena. We begin with the treatment of extraction phenomena and island constraints. An account is developed in which there are many interrelated notions of boundary, and where the sensitivity of any syntactic process to a particular class of boundaries can be addressed within the grammar. We next present a new categorial treatment of word order which factors apart the specification of the order of a h...

this paper I treat conditionals using material implication, ignoring the well-known semantic/pragmatic problems concerning their correct interpretation. Of course, one may doubt whether (7a), which is verified by any situation in which there is one woman who did not come to the party, reflects correctly the wide scope reading of the indefinite in (7). Obviously, this problem is independent of the scope problem of indefinites. For this reason and because antecedents of conditionals are one of the simplest and most striking cases of scope islands, I use such examples freely, counting on the reader to substitute her favorite theory of conditionals for material implication. This claim has been challenged in Farkas (1981), Rooth & Partee (1982:fn.6) and, more recently, in Ruys (1992) and Abusch (1994). These works all show cases where Fodor & Sag's claim is argued to be incorrect. The empirical debate will be reviewed later in this paper (subsection 3.4.2). Ruys and Abusch both conclude that Fodor & Sag's "referential" approach is inadequate. To handle the facts, Ruys proposes an indexing mechanism of indefinites within a DRT-like interpretation of LF. Abusch proposes to enrich DRT with a storage mechanism that changes the syntactic position of the N' predicate (= the restriction of the indefinite) at the representational level. Both Ruys and Abusch therefore accept the assumption of DRT about a distinct syntactic representational level for meaning. This level (sometimes called Logical Form') is additional to the syntactic level that undergoes semantic interpretation (GB's Logical Form, other theories' Surface Structure). Indefinites in Ruys and Abusch's treatments are not quantifiers. Instead, they involve the familiar treatment of DRT using free variables. I henceforth c...

Since the pioneering work of Lees and Klima (1963), it has commonly been assumed that a single generalization determines the possible antecedents of anaphors (reflexive and reciprocal expressions) in English. The mechanisms proposed to express this generalization have evolved considerably over the last quarter century, but the transformations

ver sets of atoms. We can describe these features using the notation Q and S. Flexibility operators shift meanings between the four kinds of denotations that these two features describe. The boolean theory of coordination The basic fact about coordination in many languages is its cross-categorial behaviour: morphemes like and and or can appear in coordinate structures of many dierent categories, as (partly) illustrated by the following simple sentences. (1) Mary sang and/or Sue danced. (2) Mary and/or Sue sang. (3) Mary sang and/or danced. Early versions of Transformational Grammar assumed that this property of coordination could be explained by assuming that at deep structure coordinators are sentential only, like the connectives of rst order logic. A Conjunction 1 Reduction transformation was assumed to relate phrasal coordinations

This paper shows how higher levels of generalizatlon can be introduced into unification grammars by exploiting methods for typing grammatical objects. We discuss the strategy of using global declarations to limit possible linguistic structures, and sketch a few unusual aspects of our type-checking algorithm. We also describe the sort system we use in our semantic representation language and illustrate the expressive power gained by being able to state global constraints over these sorts. Finally, we briefly illustrate the sort system by applying it to some agreement phenomena and to problems of adjunct resolution.

this paper I would like to oppose both views. A central technical point to be shown is that in the generalized quantifiers framework, and conjunctions can standardly be treated as uniformly "intersective" to account also for the truth conditions of collective predications like in (3). One general conclusion drawn from this fact is that conservative type theoretical semantics should be able to handle the problem of and in a natural way. Thus, a comprehensive theory of coordination can eliminate the ambiguity stipulation in the first approach above as well as the massive technical and ontological revisions necessitated by the second. Following this observation, we extend the semantic theory of coordinations whose "building blocks" are singular NP's. Traditionally, conjunction and disjunction are treated symmetrically using the standard Boolean definitions. The collective interpretation of sentences like (3) is obtained as a result of type shifting in the denotation of the NP. Type transition, following Partee & Rooth's notion of flexibility, is motivated by type mismatch, here between distributive generalized quantifiers and collective predicates. The shifting operator is shown to be a generalization of the existential determiner, being a part of a "natural" hierarchy of type shifting principles, in the sense of Partee(1986) and van Benthem(1986,1991). This reveals a connection between the phenomena of "free" existential quantification and collective predication in natural languages. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents some background: a brief discussion of previous proposals and a few conceptual and technical preliminaries for the alternative solution developed. Section 3 deals with coordinations of proper names. Section 4 discusses the hierarchy of ope...

. Sentences with multiple occurrences of plural definites give rise to certain effects suggesting that distributivity should be modeled by polyadic operations. Yet, in this paper it is argued that the simpler treatment of distributivity using unary universal quantification should be retained. Seemingly polyadic effects are claimed to be restricted to definite NPs. This fact is accounted for by the special anaphoric (dependent) use of definites. Further evidence concerning various plurals, island constraints and cumulative quantification are shown to support this claim. In addition, it is shown that also the evidence against a simple atomic version of unary distributivity is not decisive. In the (uncommon) cases where distributivity with definites is not strictly atomic, they can be analyzed as dependent on implicit quantifiers. 1. Introduction The proper use of distributivity operations in the analysis of plurals has been the subject of much debate. While virtually all contemporary t...

This article offers a comprehensive HPSG treatment of determiners within the Noun Phrase, accounting for their rich variety as regards distributional behaviour, category features, dependency relations and semantic contribution. To introduce the reader to the empirical problems at issue, a contrastive examination of English vs. Italian data is carried out at various points in the work, but the Romance language in particular is focussed on; especially the study of co-occurrence restrictions on Italian determiners is detailed and systematic. On the other hand, the suggested solutions go beyond language-specific considerations and provide evidence for a revision of HPSG that gives due prominence to the notion of `functor', resulting in a formally simpler approach to head-specifier dependencies and an improved version of the Semantics Principle, inter alia. The paper is divided into three main sections: section 1 briefly summarizes some general theoretical background which will be presupposed in the rest of the work; section 2 offers an extensive discussion and preliminary analysis of data concerning determiners and related issues; section 3 presents the formal treatment in terms of revised HPSG.

In this paper, we argue that an adequate approach to plural noun phrases is best formulated logically. We claim that the logical perspective on linguistic syntax and semantics is enlightening from both an empirical and a theoretical standpoint. Our goal is to show how a type-theoretic logic based on categorial grammar captures a broad range of significant syntactic and semantic generalizations in an elegant and precise manner. We propose a type-logical categorial grammar to capture the distribution, collection and scoping of plural noun phrases in English. We assume that: 1. groups are kinds of individuals 2. (ordinary) singular and plural verbs are interpreted as relations among individuals 3. (referential) singular noun phrases denote individuals 4. (referential) plural noun phrases denote sets of individuals and quantified plural noun phrases (including bare plurals) denote quantifiers over sets of individuals 5. bare plurals are introduced by an empty existential quantifier over sets 6. distribution and collection introduce quantifiers from noun phrases denoting sets: (a) distribution is universal quantification over the set (b) collection is existential quantification over groupings of the set members We demonstrate how this naturally typed, noun-phrase centered semantics, when coupled with a deductive categorial grammar, generalizes to arbitrary syntactic positions the plural type shifting schemes stipulated in the literature. In this short paper, we only touch on the basics of plural scope. In other work (Carpenter 1994; in press), we extend our basic framework to handle partitives, pseudo-partitives, plural quantifiers, floated quantifiers, non-boolean coordination, relative modifiers and interrogatives, comitative conjunction, control, negation and plural anaphors,...

Starting from an analysis for the diverging crosslinguistic grammaticality of DP-internal conjunctions such as this [man and woman] are in love, the article develops a theory of the syntax/semantics interface within the DP and a novel proposal for the interpretation of conjunction. The main claims are that plural/mass denotations are built in stages within the DP, by the combined effect of number features and semantic operators associated with functional heads; that languages differ in whether the denotation of nouns is filtered for singular or plural number, and that the word and crosslinguistically denotes SET PRODUCT, an operation which, in different contexts, can mimic the behavior of intersection and union.