Labelled deduction in the composition of form and meaning

Abstract

In the late Fifties, Jim Lambek has started a line of investigation that accounts for the composition of form and meaning in natural language in deductive terms: formal grammar is presented as a logic - a system for reasoning about the basic form/meaning units of language and the ways they can be put together into wellformed structured congurations. The reception of the categorial grammar logics in linguistic circles has always been somewhat mixed: the mathematical elegance of the original system ([Lambek 58]) is counterbalanced by clear descriptive limitations, as Lambek has been the first to emphasize on a variety of occasions.