Yusuke Kubota and Robert Levine: Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar


[Lingbuzz link]


Abstract:  This is a chapter draft of a book in preparation that presents a new theory of natural language syntax and semantics called Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar (Hybrid TLCG). Hybrid TLCG was first proposed in Yusuke Kubota's dissertation (Kubota 2010), and has since been developed by the present two authors. As of writing (November 2014), there are three journal articles (including lingbuzz/002123 and lingbuzz/002300), two manuscripts under review for publication (lingbuzz/002214 and lingbuzz/002150) and two conference papers (whose content only partially overlaps with the five longer manuscripts) which use Hybrid TLCG as the underlying framework for analyzing complex empirical phenomena such as Gapping, pseudogapping, nonconstituent coordination, complex predicates and the semantics of symmetrical predicates ("same"/"different"). See the "Preface" section of the uploaded pdf for the relevant references, and links to each paper.

We believe that our version of CG is of special interest to formal semanticists looking for a mathematically precise yet easy-to-use framework for the syntax-semantics interface. As we describe in this document and related papers, our approach offers simple modelling of important notions in the recent semantics literature such as `parasitic scope' (Barker 2007), `late merge' (Bhatt and Pancheva 2004) and `split scope' (Penka 2011), enabling us to see the `logic' underlying these phenomena in a more transparent manner than in the standard derivational architecture of grammar. Hybrid TLCG moreover enables an operation that goes beyond the analytic possibilities in derivational approaches which in effect does `overt movement' and `covert movement' at the same time. A straightforward analysis of the recalcitrant scope anomaly in Gapping (Siegel 1984, Oehrle 1987) becomes available by exploiting this analytic possibility, as discussed in lingbuzz/002123.

Though we have made every effort to present our framework clearly in each of the above papers, space limitations have made it difficult to explain all the important details in journal article and conference paper formats. The present document unpacks the relevant details in a (hopefully) considerably more leisurely and accessible format than in previously published material of ours.

This is the first version of the draft, and though we believe that it is already useful for readers who have found the above articles challenging to read, we anticipate that there are still several places where further improvements can be made. So, comments on any aspect of this document are earnestly solicited and would be very much appreciated. Please send us feedback, and we'll further revise and improve the presentation.

Yusuke Kubota (lastname.firstname.fn@u.tsukuba.ac.jp, homepage)
Robert Levine (lastname.1@osu.edu, homepage)