Concept
Combinatory categorial grammar
Overview
In formal linguistics, combinatory categorial grammar (CCG) is an efficiently parsable, yet linguistically expressive, grammar formalism. It has a transparent interface between surface syntax and underlying semantic representation, including predicate–argument structure, quantification, and information structure. The formalism generates constituency-based structures (as opposed to dependency-based ones) and is therefore a type of phrase structure grammar (as opposed to a dependency grammar).
CCG relies on combinatory logic, which has the same expressive power as the lambda calculus, but builds its expressions differently. The first linguistic and psycholinguistic arguments for basing a grammar on combinators were put forth by Steedman and Szabolcsi.
More recent prominent proponents of CCG include Pauline Jacobson and Jason Baldridge, who have continued development therein. In these new approaches, the combinator B (the "compositor") is found to be useful in creating long-distance dependencies—as in, e.g., "Who do you think Mary is talking about?"—and the combinator W (the "duplicator") is useful for the lexical interpretation of reflexive pronouns, as in "Mary talks about herself". Together with I (the identity mapping) and C (the "permutator"), these form a set of primitive, non-interdefinable combinators. Jacobson interprets personal pronouns as the combinator I; their binding is aided by a complex combinator Z, as in "Mary lost her way". Z is definable using W and B.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
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On the other hand an event-particle is defined so as to exhibit this character of being a route of approximation marked out by entities posited in sense-awareness. A definite event-particle is defined in reference to a definite punct in the following manner: Let the condition {sigma} mean the property of covering all the abstractive elements which are members of that punct; so that an abstractive set which satisfies…
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
States what Combinatory categorial grammar is.
Then follows in the second stage of expression in speech, an analysis of that total idea into its parts, in which these parts are always put into close relations with each other. Such relations are called by grammarians subject and predicate, noun and adjective, verb and adverb, &c. The grammatical meaning of these categories shows clearly that this analysis consists of a system of primary and secondary relations…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
States what Combinatory categorial grammar is.
This is nothing else than the necessity of abstract logic, which is the presupposition involved in the very fact of interrelated existence as disclosed in each immediate occasion of experience. The key to the pattern means this fact:—that from a select set of those general conditions, exemplified in any one and the same occasion, a pattern involving an infinite variety of other such conditions, also exemplified in…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
States what Combinatory categorial grammar is.
Philosophers who discussed Combinatory categorial grammar
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Part of Outline of logic.
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