Compositionality and syntactic generalisations

Abstract

In the preceding chapters a special kind of compositional grammar, M-grammar, has been introduced to describe the form and meaning (or more precisely: translational equivalence) of expressions. The basic idea of compositional grammars, e.g. Montague’s PTQ (Thomason (1974)), is that they relate form and meaning in a very direct way. Such grammars usually have a strong semantic bias, in the following sense: in a compositional grammar basic expressions are associated with a basic meaning, and syntactic rules are associated with a meaning operation, and it is the proper composition of the meaning of an expression which determines how many and which syntactic steps to form an expression are distinguished. This semantic bias is essential given the translation method adopted, but it might lead to a grammar which is less adequate from a syntactic point of view.