Categorial Grammars (Linguistic Theory Guides)

Categorial grammars come from a long independent tradition of linguistic description rooted in the philosophy of language, logic and algebra. In the last few years they have been the focus of dramatically expanding interest and activity. This book, aiming to be an introduction to categorial grammars, is written as an objective critical assessment. It outlines their historical evolution, discusses their formal basis and explores their use for a number of linguistic phenomena (including passives, raising, discontinuous dependencies, and non-constituent co-ordination). It also looks at their treatment of such general issues as word-order, psychological plausibility, logic and parsing. The book is intended as an initial text for a course on categorial grammar, or for course units on comparative grammatical theory.