The grammar and processing of order and dependency : a categorial approach

• Main Author: Hepple, Mark
• Published: University of Edinburgh 1990
• Subjects: 410
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.652370

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 head's complements from the position of the head relative to them. This move has the advantage of allowing the incorporation of a treatment of grammatical relations and obliqueness, as well as providing for the treatment of Verb Second phenomena in Germanic languages. A categorial treatment of binding is then presented which integrates the preceding proposals of the thesis, handling command constraints on binding in terms of relative oliqueness and locality constraints using the account of linguistic boundaries. Attention is given to the treatment of long distance reflexivization in Icelandic, a phenomenon of interest because of its unusual locality behaviour. Finally, a method is developed for parsing Lambek calculus grammars which avoids the efficiency problems presented by the occurrence of multiple equivalent proofs. The method involves developing a notion of normal form proof and adapting the parsing method to ensure that only normal form proofs are constructed.