Abstract

ht capture the obvious intuitions concerning constituency in a sentence like John must leave by identifying the VP leave and the NP John as the arguments of the tensed verb must, and the verb itself as a function combin- ing to its right with a VP, to yield a predicate -- that is, a leftward-combining function-from-NPs-into-sentences. One common "slash" notation for the types of such functions expresses them as lriples of the form <result, direction, argu. me. hi>, where result and argument are themselves syntactic types, and direction is indicated by "f' (for rightwardcombining functions) or ' (for leftward). Must then gets the following type-assignment: (1) must :- (SNP}/VP In pure categorial grammar, the only other element is a single "combinatory" rule of Functional Application, which gives rise to the following two instances: 1 1 All combinatory mlus are written as productions in the present paper, in contrast with the reduction rule notation used in the earlier papers. The cha

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