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This paper proposes an analysis of modal auxiliaries in English in Type-Logical Grammar. The proposed analysis captures the scopal interactions between different types of modal auxiliaries and negation by incorporating the key analytic idea of Iatridou and Zeijlstra [6], who classify English modal auxiliaries into PPI and NPI types. In order to technically implement this analysis, we build on Kubota and Levine’s [8, 10] treatment of modal auxiliaries as higher-order operators that take scope at the clausal level. The proposed extension of the Kubota/Levine analysis is shown to have several interesting consequences, including a formal derivability relation from the higher-order entry for auxiliaries to a lower-order VP/VP entry traditionally recognized in categorial grammar (CG) research. The systematic analysis of the scopal properties of auxiliaries and the somewhat more abstract meta-comparison between ‘transformational’ and ‘non-transformational’ analytic ideas that become possible in a type-logical setup highlight the value of taking a logical perspective on the syntax of natural language embodied in Type-Logical Grammar research.

Introduction: The Problem, and a Possible Solution Natural Language Data Linguists appear to be in an enviable position among scientific disciplines. The lifeblood of science is data, and unlike, say, glaciologists, who can only collect primary material for their research in remote and generally rather inhospitable parts of the planet, or particle physicists, who require access to massive, extremely expensive, and sometimes erratic machines – with demand for access to such machines far exceeding supply – linguists are literally surrounded by the kind of data that make up the target of their investigations. It's true that field linguists need informants at a considerable distance from where they themselves live, and experimental linguists often need laboratories with elaborate and sophisticated equipment. But for syntacticians – linguists who investigate the structure of sentences, a large fraction of whom (possibly a majority) study sentences in their own respective languages – matters are as convenient as they could possibly be. Syntacticians have intuitive access to all of the sentences made available by their own knowledge of their language, as well as the speech (and reactions) of their fellows in constant use around them, and ready-made corpora in the form of written materials and electronic records, many of which are available for searches based on word sequences (Google, for example, is a valuable source of data for both syntacticians and morphologists). Learning how to take advantage of this vast pool of readily available data is a major component of syntacticians’ training. In a sense, of course, the true data of syntax are not strings of words themselves, but judgments about the status of those strings of words. The syntactician's primary responsibility is to give an account of how it is that certain strings of words have the status of sentences, while other do not, and still others have a kind of shadowy intermediate status – not bad enough to be outright rubbish, but not good enough to pass completely unnoticed in conversation as utterly and tediously normal. For example, consider the status of the three word strings in (1): (1) a. I asked Robin to leave the room. b. I requested Robin to leave the room. c. I inquired (of) Robin to leave the room.

In a 1982 paper in the journal Glossa, Pullum outlined a set of arguments for treating English infinitival to as a defective auxiliary verb. Twenty years later, in his entry on infinitival constructions in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL, 2002), Huddleston argues that several distributional facts about auxiliaries fit poorly with this hypothesis. He proposes, on the basis of significant structural parallels, that to is a subordinator (complementizer). I show that Huddleston's arguments constitute a flawed analysis in CGEL's otherwise superb coverage of English descriptive grammar, and that the facts run strongly counter to his claims, often falling out independently from generalizations about auxiliaries that Huddleston overlooks. Several of these points were anticipated in Pullum's paper, but recent research on an idiosyncratic auxiliary-specific pattern of English nonrestrictive relative clause formation provides a powerful new argument in support of the auxiliary claim. In this respect, as in all others, the assignment of to to the class of auxiliaries provides the simplest and broadest account of its syntactic behavior.

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.

Head-driven phrase structure grammar is a monostratal theory of natural language grammar, based on richly specified lexical descriptions which combine according to a small set of abstract combinatory principles stated as formulae in a constraint logic regulating, for the most part, the satisfaction of valence and other properties of syntactic heads. These constraints, applying locally, determine the flow of information, encoded as feature specifications, through arbitrarily complex syntactic representations, and capture all syntactic dependencies – both local and non-local – in elegant and compact form requiring no derivational apparatus. Keywords: syntactic form; propostional structure; hierarchy; syntactic dependancies; anaphora

This book explores a wide variety of theoretically central issues in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), a major theory of syntactic representation, particularly in the domain of natural language computation. HPSG is a strongly lexicon-driven theory, like several others on the scene, but unlike the others it also relies heavily on an explicit assignment of linguistic objects to membership in a hierarchically organised network of types, where constraints associated with any given type are inherited by all of its subtypes. This theoretical architecture allows HPSG considerable flexibility within the confines of a highly restrictive, mathematically explicit formalism, requiring no derivational machinery and invoking only a single level of syntactic representation. The separate chapters consider a variety of problematic phenomena in German, Japanese and English and suggest important extensions of, and revisions to, the picture of HPSG.

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