Kalender Details

Vortragende Person/Vortragende Personen:
Mark Steedman (School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh)

In earlier work (1990, 2000), I argued that combinatory
categorial grammar (CCG) syntactic derivational structures are
directly reflected in English intonational prosodic structure, and
that such derivations translate directly and compositionality into
information structure. CCG information structures subsume traditional
logical form, rather than constituting an orthogonal level of semantic
representation. The result is to simplify the theory of grammar in
both phonological and semantic terms.

The structural case was fairly well established. However, the
semantics remained rather informal.  The present paper develops a
fully formal semantics of information structure for CCG, first
presented in 2014.

There are two standard semantic approaches to the problem of information
structure: Rooth's alternative semantics and von Stechow's structured
meanings have developed largely in isolation from any specific theory
of syntax. The former has been criticized (by Wold 1996) for
undergeneration of attested readings, while the latter is criticized
(by Rooth 2010) of overgeneralization. (A third, syntax-based, approach
within the Minimalist Program remains less developed in semantic terms.)

The present paper presents a version of an alternative semantics of
information structure embedded in CCG. The semantics is
surface-compositional in the sense that lexical items and rules of
syntactic projection map directly to both ordinary and alternative
logical values, which are derived in tandem. Syntactic derivation
correctly constrains the scope of "focus projection" to thereby
overcome previous criticisms of Rooth's approach.

Steedman, Mark (2014), The Surface-Compositional Semantics of English
Intonation, Language, 90:2-57

Abstract