Recent advances in the Super Linguistics of pictures have laid the Super Semantic foundation for modelling the phenomena of narrative sequencing and co-reference in pictorial and mixed linguistic-pictorial discourses. We take up the question of how one arrives at the pragmatic interpretations of such discourses. In particular, we offer an analysis of: (i) the discourse composition problem: how to represent the joint meaning of a multi-picture discourse, (ii) observed differences in narrative sequencing in prima facie equivalent linguistic vs pictorial discourses, (...) and (iii) the phenomenon of co-referencing across pictures. We extend Segmented Discourse Representation Theory to spell out a formal Super Pragmatics that applies to linguistic, pictorial and mixed discourses, while respecting the particular ‘genius’ of either medium and computing their distinctive pragmatic interpretations. (shrink)

Many variants of categorial grammar assume an underlying logic which is associative and linear. In relation to left extraction, the former property is challenged by island domains, which involve nonassociativity, and the latter property is challenged by parasitic gaps, which involve nonlinearity. We present a version of type logical grammar including ‘structural inhibition’ for nonassociativity and ‘structural facilitation’ for nonlinearity and we give an account of relativisation including islands and parasitic gaps and their interaction.

Categorial grammar is well-known for its elegant analysis of coordination enabled by the flexible notion of constituency it entertains. However, to date, no systematic study exists that examines whether this analysis has any obvious empirical advantage over alternative analyses of nonconstituent coordination available in phrase structure-based theories of syntax. This paper attempts precisely such a comparison. We compare the direct constituent coordination analysis of non-canonical coordinations in categorial grammar with an ellipsis-based analysis of the same phenomena in the recent HPSG (...) literature. We provide a set of empirical evidence, consisting of cases in which non-canonical coordinations interact with scopal operators of various sorts, which systematically falsifies the predictions of the latter, ‘linearization-based’ ellipsis approach to coordination. We propose an alternative analysis in a variant of categorial grammar called Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar. The proposed framework builds on both the Lambek-inspired variants of categorial grammar and a more recent line of work modelling word order via a lambda calculus for the prosodic component. The flexible syntax–semantics interface of this framework straightforwardly captures the interactions between non-canonical coordinations and scopal expressions, demonstrating the broader empirical payoff of the direct constituent coordination analysis of non-canonical coordinations pioneered by Steedman :523–568, 1985; Linguist Philos 13:207–263, 1990) and Dowty hitherto not explicitly recognized in the literature. (shrink)

In Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, the well-formed expressions of a language are licensed by correspondences between phonology, syntax, and conceptual structure. I show how this architecture can be used to make sense of the existence of parasitic gap constructions. A parasitic gap is one that is rendered acceptable because of the presence of another gap in the same sentence. Compare *a person who everyone who talks to likes Chris, which shows an illicit extraction from a relative clause, and a person everyone (...) who talks to likes, which shows a parasitic gap in the relative clause. Languages differ in terms of the range of configurations in which they allow parasitic gaps; these configurations appear to form a hierarchy.These observations raise some fundamental questions: Why do parasitic gaps exist at all?Why are different syntactic configurations possible for P-gaps and why just these configurations?Why is there a parasitic gap hierarchy?The answers that I propose make crucial use of constructional overgeneralization of across-the-board extraction in coordinate constructions, formulated straightforwardly in the framework of Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture. (shrink)

The idea that conventionalized general knowledge – sometimes referred to as a frame – guides the perception and interpretation of the world around us has long permeated various branches of cognitive science, including psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. In this paper we provide experimental evidence suggesting that frames also play a role in explaining certain long-distance dependency phenomena, as originally proposed by Deane. We focus on a constraint that restricts the extraction of an NP from another NP, called subextraction, which (...) Deane claims is ultimately a framing effect. In Experiment 1 we provide evidence showing that referents are extractable to the degree that they are deemed important for the proposition expressed by the utterance. This suggests that the world knowledge that the main verb evokes plays a key role in establishing which referents are extractable. In Experiment 2 we offer evidence suggesting that the acceptability of deep subextractions is correlated with the overall plausibility of the proposition, suggesting that complex structures can evoke complex frames as well, if sufficiently frequent and semantically coherent, and therefore more easily license deeper subextractions. (shrink)

Sentences that are ungrammatical and yet intelligible are instances of what I call perfectly thinkable thoughts. I argue that the existence of perfectly thinkable thoughts is revealing in regard to the question of why syntactic islands should exist. If language is an instrument of thought as understood in the biolinguistics tradition, then a uniquely human subset of thoughts is generated in narrow syntax, which suggests that island constraints cannot be rooted in narrow syntax alone and thus must reflect interface conditions (...) imposed on the output of the computational system and its mapping to external systems. (shrink)