Extending free pregroups with lower bounds (Q993496)

The paper presents a formal grammar for radically lexicalized systems with a universal set of rules and a lexicon that attributes categories to lexical elements. The authors propose an alternative algebraic approach to predominant type-logical grammar in which categories are formulas of the associative Lambek calculus. This approach is based on algebras called pregroups. A pregroup is defined as a partially ordered monoid enriched with two unary operations, viz. left/right inverse/adjoint. An extension of free pregroups with lower bounds on sets of pregroup elements is proposed. Pregroup grammars based on such free pregroups provide a kind of an algebraic counterpart to universal quantification over type variables. In particular, the authors define a lower bound augmented pregroup grammar, LBPGG, and express coordination and extraction in LBPGG. Finally, they show how the grammar is applicable to the syntactic analysis of natural language (English) and compare two such applications with the syntactic analysis in type-logical grammar. The membership problem for LBPGG languages is reduced to deciding inequations in extended free pregroups. Since the latter is an open problem, the membership decidability problem remains open as well.