Lambek Calculus and Preposing of Embedded Subjects*

A variety of accounts of this paradigm have been offered in the literature. We mention Bresnan's (1972) Fixed Subject Constraint and the *that -trace filter of Chomsky & Lasnik (1977) and subsequent work in the GB tradition. These two accounts share the view that the explanation of the oddity of (3) lies in prohibiting an element of a certain sort -namely, the complementizer that -from preceding a gap of a certain kind. In this paper, we investigate the problem from a somewhat different angle. We assume an analytic framework in which there are no gaps, and hence, no gaps of the sort required by the accounts of either Bresnan or Chomsky & Lasnik. We first review the properties of two categorial systems, the Associative Syntactic Calculus AL (Lambek, 1958) and the NonAssociative Syntactic Calculus nAL (Lambek, 1961), and show how they are adapatable to the analysis of simple sentences. We then show, following Steedman (1985), how categorial systems of this kind can treat discontinuous dependencies of the sort found in English topicalization and whmovement in simple clauses. It is not altogether obvious how to treat the paradigm above within this framework of assumptions. The remainder of the paper is devoted to showing how this can be done.