Predictive combinators

Abstract

Steedman (1985, 1987) and others have proposed that Categorial Grammar, a theory of syntax in which grammatical categories are viewed as functions, be augmented with operators such as functional composition and type raising in order to analyze "noncanonical" syntactic constructions such as wh- extraction and node raising. A consequence of these augmentations is an explosion of semantically equivalent derivations admitted by the grammar. The present work proposes a method for circumventing this spurious ambiguity problem. It involves deriving new, specialized combinators and replacing the orginal basic combinators with these derived ones. In this paper, examples of these predictive combinators are offered and their effects illustrated. An algorithm for deriving them, as well as a discussion of their semantics, will be presented in forthcoming work.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 38 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.