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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...

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From a logical perspective, categorial type systems can be situated within a landscape of substructural logics --- logics with a structure-sensitive consequence relation. Research on these logics has shown that the inhabitants of the substructural hierarchy can be systematically related by embedding translations on the basis of structural modalities. The modal operators offer controlled access to stronger logics from within weaker ones by licensing of structural operations. Linguistic material exhibits structure in dimensions not covered by the standard structural rules. The purpose of this paper is to generalize the modalisation and licensing strategy to two such dimensions: phrasal structure and headedness. Phrasal domain-sensitive type systems capture the notion of constituent structure; constituency relaxation can be licensed via an associativity modality. The opposition between heads and non-heads introduces dependency structure, an autonomous dimension of linguistic structure wh...

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Formalizing “meaning as context ” mathematically leads to a new, algebraic theory of meaning, in which composition is bilinear and associative. These properties are shared by other methods that have been proposed in the literature, including the tensor product, vector addition, pointwise multiplication, and matrix multiplication. Entailment can be represented by a vector lattice ordering, inspired by a strengthened form of the distributional hypothesis, and a degree of entailment is defined in the form of a conditional probability. Approaches to the task of recognizing textual entailment, including the use of subsequence matching, lexical entailment probability, and latent Dirichlet allocation, can be described within our framework. 1.

Vol. 2 (4:3) 2006, pp. 1–44 www.lmcs-online.org

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this paper, we will study the possibilities for applying lexical rules to the analysis of English syntax, and in particular the structure of the verb phrase. We will develop a lexicon whose empirical coverage extends to the full range of verb subcategories, complex adverbial phrases, auxiliaries, the passive construction, yes/no questions and the particularly troublesome case of predicatives. The effect of a lexical rule, in our system, will be to produce new lexical entries from old lexical entries. The similarity between our system and the metarule system of generalized phrase-structure grammar (GPSG, as presented in Gazdar, et al. 1985) is not coincidental. Our lexical rules serve much the same purpose as metarules in GPSG, which were restricted to lexical phrase structure rules. The similarity is in a large part due to the fact that with the universal phrase-structure schemes being fixed, the role of a lexical category assignment in effect determines phrase-structure in much the same way as a lexical category entry and lexical phrase-structure rule determines lexical phrase-structure in GPSG. Our lexical rules will also bear a relationship to the lexical rules found in lexical-functional grammar (LFG, see Bresnan 1982), as LFG rules are driven by the grammatical role assigned to arguments. Many of our analyses were first applied to either LFG or GPSG, as these were the first serious linguistic theories based on a notion of unification. In the process of explaining the basic principles behind categorial grammar and developing our lexical rule system, we will establish a categorial grammar lexicon with coverage of English syntactic constructions comparable to that achieved within published accounts of the GPSG or LFG frameworks. Language, at its most abstract level, i...