Type grammars as pregroups (Q5949346)

Type grammars are usually based on the notion of a residuated monoid. In this article the author presents an alternative account of type grammars in which the notion of a pregroup is used instead. Starting from a partially ordered set \(A_{\leq }\) of basic types, simple and compounds types are constructed, the latter being strings of simple types. The lexicon of a natural language like English is built by assigning a compound type to its words and morphems. A string of words of type \(z\) is a sentence (type \(s\)) if \(z\leq s\). The small fragment of English defined in section 2 is applied to various grammatical constructions like negation and questions in the following sections. In sections 9 and 10 it is shown that the pregroup used for the English fragment cannot be taken as being freely generated by the set of basic types since in addition so-called reduction rules have to be introduced that do not respect the underlying partial order on the basic types. The grammar is therefore not entirely contained in the lexicon. As a result, the grammatical rules are not implicitly given in the lexicon.