A Frobenius Algebraic Analysis for Parasitic Gaps

The interpretation of parasitic gaps is an ostensible case of non-linearity in natural language composition. Existing categorial analyses, both in the typelogical and in the combinatory traditions, rely on explicit forms of syntactic copying. We identify two types of parasitic gapping where the duplication of semantic content can be confined to the lexicon. Parasitic gaps in adjuncts are analysed as forms of generalized coordination with a polymorphic type schema for the head of the adjunct phrase. For parasitic gaps affecting arguments of the same predicate, the polymorphism is associated with the lexical item that introduces the primary gap. Our analysis is formulated in terms of Lambek calculus extended with structural control modalities. A compositional translation relates syntactic types and derivations to the interpreting compact closed category of finite dimensional vector spaces and linear maps with Frobenius algebras over it. When interpreted over the necessary semantic spaces, the Frobenius algebras provide the tools to model the proposed instances of lexical polymorphism.Comment: SemSpace 2019, to appear in Journal of Applied Logic

On the generative capacity of multi-modal Categorial Grammars

In Moortgat 1996 the Lambek Calculus L (Lambek 1958) is extended by a pair of residuation modalities ◊ and □↓. Categorial Grammars based on the resulting logic L◊ are attractive for linguistic purposes since they offer a compromise between the strict constituent structures imposed by context free grammars and related formalisms on the one hand, and the complete absence of hierarchical information in Lambek grammars on the other hand. The paper contains some results on the generative capcity of Categorial Grammars based on L◊. First it is shown that adding residuation modalities does not extend the weak generative capacity. This is proved by extending the proof for the context freeness of L-grammars from Pentus 1993 to L◊. Second the strong generative capacity of L◊-grammars is compared to context free grammars. The results are mainly negative. The set of tree languages generated by L◊-grammars neither contains nor is contained in the class of context free tree languages

Poset products as relational models

We introduce a relational semantics based on poset products, and provide sufficient conditions guaranteeing its soundness and completeness for various substructural logics. We also demonstrate that our relational semantics unifies and generalizes two semantics already appearing in the literature: Aguzzoli, Bianchi, and Marra's temporal flow semantics for H\'ajek's basic logic, and Lewis-Smith, Oliva, and Robinson's semantics for intuitionistic Lukasiewicz logic. As a consequence of our general theory, we recover the soundness and completeness results of these prior studies in a uniform fashion, and extend them to infinitely-many other substructural logics