Mixing Modes of Linguistic Description in Categorial Grammar

Recent work within the field of Categorial Grammar has seen the development of approaches that allow different modes of logical behaviour to be displayed within a single system, something corresponding to making available differing modes of linguistic description. Earlier attempts to achieve this goal have employed modal op- erators called structural modalities, whose use presents a number of problems. I propose an alternative approach, involving co- existence and interrelation of different sublogics, that eliminates the need for structural modalities, whilst maintaining the de- scriptive power they provide

Mixing Modes of Linguistic Description in Categorial Grammar

Recent work within the field of Categorial Grammar has seen the development of approaches that allow different modes of logical behaviour to be displayed within a single system, something corresponding to making available differing modes of linguistic description. Earlier attempts to achieve this goal have employed modal operators called structural modalities, whose use presents a number of problems. I propose an alternative approach, involving coexistence and interrelation of different sublogics, that eliminates the need for structural modalities, whilst maintaining the descriptive power they provide. 1 Introduction Categorial Grammar formalisms consist of logics. Syntactic information (e.g. subcategorisation, word order) is encoded in complex formulas or types assigned to lexical items. Syntactic derivation is via deduction over lexical formulas. Alternative systems differ in the logics they use, 1 which may be classified by their limitations on the use of `resources' (i.e. assu..