Contents 1 Introduction: grammatical reasoning 1 2 Linguistic inference: the Lambek systems 5 2.1 Modelinggrammaticalcomposition ............................ 5 2.2 Gentzen calculus, cut elimination and decidability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.3 Discussion: options for resource management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3 The syntax-semantics interface: proofs and readings 16 3.1 Term assignment for categorial deductions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 3.2 Natural language interpretation: the deductive view . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 4 Grammatical composition: multimodal systems 26 4.1 Mixedinference:themodesofcomposition........................ 26 4.2 Grammaticalcomposition:unaryoperations ....................... 30 4.2.1 Unary connectives: logic and structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 4.2.2 Applications: imposing constraints, structural relaxation

This paper uses a partially ordered set of syntactic categories to accommodate optionality and licensing in natural language syntax. A complex but well-studied data set pertaining to the syntax of quantifier scope and negative polarity licensing in Hungarian is used to illustrate the proposal. The presentation is geared towards both linguists and logicians. The main ideas can be implemented in different grammar formalisms; in this paper the partial ordering on categories is given by the derivability relation of a calculus with residuated and galois-connected unary operators.