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A novel logic-based framework for representing the syntax–semantics interface of natural language, applicable to a range of phenomena. In this book, Yusuke Kubota and Robert Levine propose a type-logical version of categorial grammar as a viable alternative model of natural language syntax and semantics. They show that this novel logic-based framework is applicable to a range of phenomena—especially in the domains of coordination and ellipsis—that have proven problematic for traditional approaches. The type-logical syntax the authors propose takes derivations of natural language sentences to be proofs in a particular kind of logic governing the way words and phrases are combined. This logic builds on and unifies two deductive systems from the tradition of categorial grammar; the resulting system, Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar (Hybrid TLCG) enables comprehensive approaches to coordination (gapping, dependent cluster coordination, and right-node raising) and ellipsis (VP ellipsis, pseudogapping, and extraction/ellipsis interaction). It captures a number of intricate patterns of interaction between scopal operators and seemingly incomplete constituents that are frequently found in these two empirical domains. Kubota and Levine show that the hybrid calculus underlying their framework incorporates key analytic ideas from competing approaches in the generative syntax literature to offer a unified and systematic treatment of data that have posed considerable difficulties for previous accounts. Their account demonstrates that logic is a powerful tool for analyzing the deeper principles underlying the syntax and semantics of natural language. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Ochanomizu University, Ohio State University, The scope parallelism in the Geach sentence (Every boy loves, and every girl detests, some saxophonist) and the related parallel interpretation requirement in pronominal binding is a pervasive phenomenon found across different types of coordination and ellipsis phenomena. Previous accounts all resort to additional constraints of some sort that restrict the otherwise flexible syntax-semanticsinterface to avoid overgeneration. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to this long-standing problem. We show that, by taking a proof-theoretic perspective on natural language semantics and by viewing the ambiguity resolution for pronouns and indefinites as underspecification resolution thatinvokes extra proof search, a conceptually natural solution emerges for the problem of interpretive parallelism. The analysis is cast in Dependent Type Semantics, with Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar as the syntax-semantics interface backbone. For empirical illustration, we show how the proposed approach correctly accounts for the classical Geach paradigm and its pronominal variant.

This paper proposes a unified analysis of the ‘respective’ readings of plural and conjoined expressions, the internal readings of symmetrical predicates such as same and different, and the summative readings of expressions such as a total of $10000. These expressions pose significant challenges to compositional semantics, and have been studied extensively in the literature. However, almost all previous studies focus exclusively on one of these phenomena, and the close parallels and interactions that they exhibit have been mostly overlooked to date. We point out two key properties common to these phenomena: (i) they target all types of coordination, including nonconstituent coordination such as Right-Node Raising and Dependent Cluster Coordination; (ii) the three phenomena all exhibit multiple dependency, both by themselves and with respect to each other. These two parallels suggest that one and the same mechanism is at the core of their semantics. Building on this intuition, we propose a unified analysis of these phenomena, in which the meanings of expressions involving coordination are formally modelled as multisets, that is, sets that allow for duplicate occurrences of identical elements. The analysis is couched in Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar. The flexible syntax-semantics interface of this framework enables an analysis of ‘respective’ readings and related phenomena which, for the first time in the literature, yields a simple and principled solution for both the interactions with nonconstituent coordination and the multiple dependency noted above.

The scope anomaly observed in sentences like Mrs. J can’t live in Boston and Mr. J in LA (¬◊>∧) and No dog eats Whiskas or cat Alpo (¬∃>∨) is known to pose difficult challenges to many analyses of Gapping. We provide new arguments, based on both the basic syntactic patterns of Gapping and standard constituency tests, that the so-called ‘low VP coordination analysis’—the only extant analysis of Gapping in contemporary syntactic theories which accounts for this scope anomaly—is empirically untenable. We propose an explicit alternative analysis of Gapping in Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar, a variant of categorial grammar which builds on both the Lambek-inspired tradition and a more recent line of work modelling word order via a lambda calculus for the prosodic component. The flexible syntax-semantics interface of this framework enables us to characterize Gapping as an instance of like-category coordination, via a crucial use of the notion of hypothetical reasoning. This analysis of the basic syntax of Gapping is shown to interact with independently motivated analyses of scopal operators to immediately yield their apparently anomalous scopal properties in Gapping, offering, for the first time in the literature, a conceptually simple and empirically adequate solution for the notorious scope anomaly in Gapping.

Collins et al. 2008 offers a principles-and-parameters-based analysis of an AAVE construction first described in Spears 1998, in which nominal phrases such as John's ass appear to have exactly the same denotation, and behavior with respect to familiar conditions on anaphora, as the possessor [ John , and similarly for pronominal possessors. Agreement, however, reflects not the properties of the possessor, but of the possessed nominal ass , which belongs to a small, closed class of lexical items that behave in parallel fashion and which the authors call 'mask' nominals. Collins and colleagues convincingly argue that the class of NPs consisting of possessors attached to mask nominals have the same syntactic structure as ordinary NPs displaying (pro)nominal possessors. In order to account for the split between anaphora and agreement, however, they are apparently forced to invoke a very complex derivational mechanism that includes a lowering rule, along with a number of other highly stipulative components, in order to encompass certain related constructions. I offer a far simpler and empirically more comprehensive alternative treatment in which mask nominals are nothing more than semantically parasitic heads, based on Kathol's (1999) dichotomy between AGR(eement) and INDEX specifications within head-driven phrase structure grammar representations. Collins and colleagues adduce what they take to be empirical arguments against such an approach, but these arguments are, as I show, all predicated on a basic technical misinterpretation of the nature of indices in the HPSG syntax/semantics interface, and thus have no force. Comparison of the two approaches is interesting not only in the context of the phenomenon described by Spears, but also in terms of broader, cross-framework issues-in particular, the question of whether or not movement and feature matching are merely two alternative, interconvertible ways of expressing linkages between structurally distant categories.

We argue that the phenomenon described and discussed in the literature as locative or stylistic inversion in English is actually a conflation of twoquite different constructions: on the one hand, light inversion (LI), inwhich the postverbal NP element can be phonologically and structurallyextremely simple, possibly consisting of a single name, and on the otherhand heavy inversion (HI), where the postverbal element is heavy in thesense of Heavy NP Shift.1 We present evidence that the preverbal PP in LI patterns with subjects but the PP in HI is a syntactic topic, usinga variety of tests which distinguish A-positions from Ā-positions.Other significant differences between HI and LI, such as the classesof verbs which support these two constructions respectively, and thedifferential behavior of HI and LI with respect to adverbial placement,provide support for interpreting HI as a case of Heavy NP Shiftapplying to subject constituents.

Once again we would like to thank our critics for replying to our comments and continuing the discussion of the issues that we raised in our original Topic-Comment piece. We feel that this debate is important as it touches on fundamental questions concerning the scientific status of linguistic theories and the way in which they are accepted. We will take up their main points in turn and then offer some concluding remarks.

Dans un article precedent, les As. ont critique les fondements theoriques et methodologiques du programme minimaliste en s'insurgeant contre le fait que les postulats et les principes de ce paradigme theorique aient ete aussi facilement adoptes par la communaute scientifique. Cet article a suscite des reactions de la part de A. Holmberg, E. Reuland, I. Roberts, M. Piattelli-Palmarini et J. Uriagereka, qui ont fait l'objet de publications dans le present numero. Les As. font ici le bilan des critiques emises a propos de leur article et montrent dans quelle mesure elles revelent des contradictions conditionnees par une tendance a accepter, sans discussion critique, des arguments provenant d'une autorite

Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar represents the fruits of a decade of research in feature-based syntactic theory. It belongs to a select company of linguistic monographs which are both monumental and intensely provocative, including among their number Chomsky (I965, I98I), Ross (1967) and Gazdar et al. (I985). Like other works in this elite group, Pollard & Sag's book addresses simultaneously a wide variety of grammatical phenomena and a set of fundamental questions about the nature of syntactic representations which have shaped the direction of theoretical work by investigators throughout the field, leading to hundreds of papers and new hypotheses, including, inevitably, challenges and counterproposals to the analyses proposed by the authors. There is, in addition, a second domain in which Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar has had major impact in linguistics the field of computational implementations, where the framework proposed by the authors that gives their book its name has rapidly become the theory of choice, a fact particularly evident in the European computational scene. The book's organization can be understood in terms of the syntax/ semantics dichotomy, and, within the syntactic discussion that takes up the first half of the book, the application of the technology outlined in the first chapter to progressively less local grammatical dependencies, insofar as locality was understood in the early generative era. Thus, after the first chapter, in which the feature-logic formalism of the theory is lightly sketched and the major constraints which the theory comprises are stated, or at least alluded to, we are given in chapter 2 a discussion of agreement. Chapter 3 is explicitly devoted to issues of subcategorization and complementation.

In current linguistic theory, the theoretical status of adjunct extractions, as in for example How often do you think Robin sees Kim? is, somewhat surprisingly, an unresolved issue, with some investigators arguing that only arguments extract syntactically, entailing analyses of adverbial gaps via fundamentally different mechanisms from those posited for argument extraction. We adduce extensive evidence against such positions from a number of languages which exhibit morphological or syntactic phenomena which are sensitive to binding (extraction) domains and where this morphosyntactic flagging is present in instances of adjunct extraction as well as argument extraction. We also present language-internal arguments for the syntactic nature of adjunct extraction in English, including the coextensiveness of adjunct and argument extraction and their parallelism with respect to strong/weak crossover effects. Finally, we discuss the challenge which binding domain effects pose for accounts of adjunct extraction in various frameworks.

Since Noam Chomsky's 1977 paper ‘On wh-movement’, syntactic theorists almost universally have assumed that tough/too/enough constructions are to be treated by the same formal mechanism as wh-extraction constructions, in spite of well-known syntactic divergences between the two types. We argue that these divergences reflect a real dichotomy between unbounded dependencies with fillers in A(rgument) positions, e.g. tough constructions, and those whose fillers occupy non-argument (A-bar) positions, e.g. topicalization. We first show that strong external evidence exists supporting the GPSG-internal prediction of full syntactic connectivity between Aposition fillers and their gap sites, but that this result seems contradicted by the existence of case conflict between the filler and gap. To overcome this contradiction, we introduce a new gap-licensing feature GAP, and show how a number of other divergences between A- and A-bar filler/gap constructions follow as a consequence.

This paper compares transformation-based and constraint-based treatments of unbounded filler-gap dependencies, the latter specifically as articulated in terms of HPSG, and argues, contrary to the commonly made allegations of notational variance , that there is purely empirical evidence that is consistent with only the constraint-based account. Recent proposals to deal with parasitic gaps in terms of null pronominals and empty operators are unable to account for the phenomenon of symbiotic gaps, the apparent case mismatches found in parasitic gap constructions, or (in general) for the well-known across-the-board effects within coordinate structures.

I propose to summarize a number of findings from recent fieldwork and analysis which suggest that the evidence offered in support of the "classical" Na-Dene hypothesis (i.e., as set up by Sapir in his 1915 statement) is spurious, and that there is currently no empirical basis for including Haida in the Na-Dene grouping.' Writers on the Na-Dene hypothesis have in the past relied heavily on the significance of supposedly shared grammatical features; hence much of the debate, so far as Haida is concerned, hinges on the accuracy of Swanton's 1911 grammar for the Handbook of American Indian Languages.2 This is unfortunate, because much of Swanton's analysis contains major flaws, for example, inaccurate segmentation of individual morphemes and confusion of homophonous suffixes. The principal short

Farkas (1986) argues that earlier work by Horvath on Hungarian clause structure appealing to constituent-lowering movement is incorrect, and that no such ‘downgrading’ movement exists in natural languages. Farkas then claims that while this lack of downgrading movement must be stipulated in the GB framework, it follows as a theorem from GPSG formalism. I argue here that the formal structure of GPSG is completely compatible with the existence of down-grading constructions. A rule system implementing such constructions is presented together with a compositional semantics which yields the appropriate semantic representations for such constructions. It follows that the possibility of lower filler/higher gap linkages is irrelevant to theory comparison between GB and GPSG, or indeed, between any pair of theories both of which include a phrase structure component.

0. Kwakwala, like all other members of the Wakashan family, is characterized by a morphology which is unusually rich and complex, even by Amerindian standards.' Several elements of this morphology have syntactic effects which correspond to passive constructions in English and other Indo-European languages. In attempting to construct an insightful description of these Kwakwala forms, we encounter certain types of difficulties which classically "polysynthetic" languages present to re