Against successive cyclicity: A proof-theoretic account of extraction pathway marking
Yusuke Kubota, Bob Levine
August 2024 

This paper proposes a novel analysis of extraction pathway marking in Type-Logical Grammar, taking advantage of proof-theoretic properties of logical proofs whose empirical application has so far been underexplored. The key idea is to allow certain linguistic expressions to be sensitive to the intermediate status of a syntactic proof. The relevant conditions can be stated concisely as constraints at the level of the proof term language, which is formally a special type of lambda calculus. The proposed analysis does not have any direct analog to either of the two familiar techniques in the syntactic literature for analyzing extraction pathway marking, namely, successive cyclic movement in derivational syntax and the SLASH feature percolation in HPSG. It nonetheless captures the relevant empirical patterns at least equally successfully. This new analysis is conceptually revealing as well: on the 'meaning-centered' perspective that emerges naturally from this approach, extraction pathway marking essentially boils down to a strategy that certain languages employ for overtly flagging the existence of a semantic variable inside a partially derived linguistic expression whose interpretation is dependent on a higher-order operator located in a structurally distant position.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007782 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	under review
keywords:	extraction, long-distance dependencies, extraction pathway marking, type-logical grammar, hybrid type-logical grammar, proof theory, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [December 2023]
Downloaded:	729 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]