To deal with long-distance dependencies, Applicative Universal Grammar (AUG) proposes a new type of categorial rides, called superposition rules. We compare the AUG rules with the alternative rules of Steedman's Combinatery Categorial Grammar (CCG) (Steedman, 1987, 1988, 1990; Szabolcsi, 1987; Ades and Steedman, 1982). In contrast to Steedtmm's rules, the AUG rules are free from inconsistencies...

This paper shows the existence of an equilibrium pragmatic Language with a universal grammar as a coordination device under communication misunderstandings. Such a language plays a key role in achieving efficient outcomes in those Sender-Receiver games where there may exist noisy information transmission. The Language is pragmatic in the sense that the Receiver’ best response depends on the con...

The alignment problem for synchronous grammars in its unrestricted form, i.e. whether for a grammar and a string pair the grammar induces an alignment of the two strings, reduces to the universal recognition problem, but restrictions may be imposed on the alignment sought, e.g. alignments may be 1 : 1, island-free or sure-possible sorted. The complexities of 15 restricted alignment problems in ...

The approach to generative grammar originating with Chomsky (1957) has been enormously successful within linguistics. Seeing such success, one wonders whether a similar approach might help us understand other human domains besides language. One such domain is morality. Could there be universal generative moral grammar? More specifically, might it be useful to moral theory to develop an explicit...

Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) is generally construed as a fully lexicalized formalism, where all grammars use one and the same universal set of rules, and crosslinguistic variation is isolated in the lexicon. In this paper, we show that the weak generative capacity of this ‘pure’ form of CCG is strictly smaller than that of CCG with grammar-specific rules, and of other mildly context-sen...

A central component of Kallmeyer and Joshi 2003 is the idea that the contribution of a quantifier is separated into a scope and a predicate argument part. Quantified NPs are analyzed as multi-component TAGs, where the scope part of the quantifier introduces the proposition containing the quantifier, and the predicate-argument part introduces the restrictive clause. This paper shows that this as...

This paper presents an analysis of the English instrumental markers with and 15 verbal use. As with other thematic roles, the semantic generalizations encoded by the role Instrument have been difficult to precisely characterize. In this study, we analyze the distinct semantic contributions of with and use, illuminating several properties of instrumental meaning. In particular, use specifies tha...

This paper reports the findings from an interconnected set of experiments designed to assess children’s knowledge of the semantic interactions between negation and quantified NPs. Our main finding is that young children, unlike adults, systematically interpret these elements on the basis of their position in overt syntax. We argue that this observation can be derived from an interplay between f...

Newmeyer (2004) argues that the notion of parameter of Universal Grammar has no role to play in accounting for cross-linguistic differences in syntax, and that, instead, “language-particular differences are captured by differences in language-particular rules” (183). He tries to show that parameter-approaches “have failed to live up to their promise” (181) and that “the hopeful vision of UG as ...