Abstract

In the late Fifties, Jim Lambek has started a line of investigation that accounts for the composition of form and meaning in natural language in deductive terms: formal grammar is presented as a logic — a system for reasoning about the basic form/meaning units of language and the ways they can be put together into wellformed structured configurations. The reception of the categorial grammar logics in linguistic circles has always been somewhat mixed: the mathematical elegance of the original system ([Lambek 58]) is counterbalanced by clear descriptive limitations, as Lambek has been the first to emphasize on a variety of occasions. As a result of the deepened understanding of the options for ‘substructural ’ styles of reasoning, the categorial architecture has been redesigned in recent work, in ways that suggest that mathematical elegance may indeed be compatible with linguistic sophistication. A careful separation of the logical and the structural components of the categorial inference engine leads to the identification of constants of grammatical reasoning. At the level of the basic rules of use and proof for these constants one finds an explanation for the uniformities in the composition of form and meaning across languages. Cross-linguistic variation in the realization of the form-meaning correspondence is captured in terms of structural inference packages, acting as plug-ins with respect to the base logic of the grammatical

Citations