The Syntactic Process

In this book Mark Steedman argues that the surface syntax of natural languages mapsspoken and written forms directly to a compositional semantic representation that includespredicate-argument structure, quantification, and information structure without constructing anyintervening structural representation. His purpose is to construct a principled theory of naturalgrammar that is directly compatible with both explanatory linguistic accounts of a number ofproblematic syntactic phenomena and a straightforward computational account of the way sentences aremapped onto representations of meaning. The radical nature of Steedman's proposal stems from hisclaim that much of the apparent complexity of syntax, prosody, and processing follows from thelexical specification of the grammar and from the involvement of a small number of universalrule-types for combining predicates and arguments. These syntactic operations are related to thecombinators of Combinatory Logic, engendering a much freer definition of derivational constituencythan is traditionally assumed. This property allows Combinatory Categorial Grammar to captureelegantly the structure and interpretation of coordination and intonation contour in English as wellas some well-known interactions between word order, coordination, and relativization across a numberof other languages. It also allows more direct compatibility with incremental semanticinterpretation during parsing.

The book covers topics in formal linguistics,intonational phonology, computational linguistics, and experimental psycholinguistics, presentingthem as an integrated theory of the language faculty in a form accessible to readers from any ofthose fields.

Mark Steedman is Professor of Cognitive Science in the Division of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Surface Structure and Interpretation (MIT Press, 1996).