Richard T. Oehrle - Böcker

The structure and properties of any natural language expression depend on its component sub-expressions, "resources", and relations among them that are sensitive to basic structural properties of order, grouping, and multiplicity. Resource-sensitivity thus provides a perspective on linguistic structure that is well-defined and universally applicable. The papers in this collection examine linguistic resources and resource-sensitivity from a variety of perspectives, including: modal aspects of categorial type inference; multi-dimensional type structures and grammatical architecture; resource-sensitive aspects of binding and anaphora; resource-sensitive inference; and discourse context. In particular, the book contains a number of papers treating anaphorically-dependent expressions as functions, whose application to an appropriate argument yields a type and an interpretation directly integratable with the surrounding grammatical structure.

The structure and properties of any natural language expression depend on its component sub-expressions, "resources", and relations among them that are sensitive to basic structural properties of order, grouping, and multiplicity. Resource-sensitivity thus provides a perspective on linguistic structure that is well-defined and universally applicable. The papers in this collection examine linguistic resources and resource-sensitivity from a variety of perspectives, including: modal aspects of categorial type inference; multi-dimensional type structures and grammatical architecture; resource-sensitive aspects of binding and anaphora; resource-sensitive inference; and discourse context. In particular, the book contains a number of papers treating anaphorically-dependent expressions as functions, whose application to an appropriate argument yields a type and an interpretation directly integratable with the surrounding grammatical structure.

For the most part, the papers collected in this volume stern from presentations given at a conference held in Tucson over the weekend of May 31 through June 2, 1985. We wish to record our gratitude to the participants in that conference, as well as to the National Science Foundation (Grant No. BNS-8418916) and the University of Arizona SBS Research Institute for their financial support. The advice we received from Susan Steele on organizational matters proved invaluable and had many felicitous consequences for the success of the con- ference. We also would like to thank the staff of the Departments of Linguistics of the University of Arizona and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for their help, as weIl as a number of individuals, including Lin Hall, Kathy Todd, and Jiazhen Hu, Sandra Fulmer, Maria Sandoval, Natsuko Tsujimura, Stuart Davis, Mark Lewis, Robin Schafer, Shi Zhang, Olivia Oehrle-Steele, and Paul Saka. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Martin Scrivener, our editor, for his patience and his encouragement.Vll INTRODUCTION The term 'categorial grammar' was introduced by Bar-Rillel (1964, page 99) as a handy way of grouping together some of his own earlier work (1953) and the work of the Polish logicians and philosophers Lesniewski (1929) and Ajdukiewicz (1935), in contrast to approaches to linguistic analysis based on phrase structure grammars.