Categorial Grammars, Lexical Rules, and the English Predicative
Bob Carpenter · Formal Grammar · 1992
Abstract When applying categorial grammars to the study of natural languages, it is traditional to assume a universal collection of phrasestructure schemes. Not only are these phrase-structure schemes applied cross-linguistically, but a compositional type-driven functional semantics is usually assumed to be determined by syntactic structure. It follows from these strong semantic and syntactic restrictions that all language-specific generalizations must be lexically determined in a categorial grammar; once the lexicon is established for a language, universal rules of syntactic and semantic combination take over to completely determine the set of grammatical expressions and their meanings. With such a large responsibility being assigned to the lexicon, it is not surprising that a simple list is not a sufficiently structured way of organizing lexical information. To achieve any degree of empirical coverage, lexical mechanisms must be provided to account for natural generalizations that exist within the lexicon of a single language.