Abstract Categorial Grammars for Modeling the Interface Between Syntax and Semantics Incorporating Negative Events

Categorial Grammars (ACGs) are a type-theoretic grammatical framework inspired by Montague Grammar. They provide a fully compositional architecture in which syntactic derivations are mapped to semantic representations by means of a typed homomorphism. ACGs have proven useful for modeling a range of grammatical formalisms, including Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG), which has been extensively investigated as a model of natural language syntax because of its mildly context-sensitive expressive power and polynomial-time parsing algorithms. In this work, we adopt ACGs to model the syntax–semantics interface, with the syntactic component based on TAG. The semantic component of this work builds on negative-event semantics—a recent development in Neo-Davidsonian event semantics centered on the notion of negative events—to provide adequate analyses of core semantic phenomena that have eluded satisfactory treatment in prior work. By exploring this semantic account, our approach captures intricate interactions among various phenomena at the syntax–semantics interface, including event quantifiers, negation, quantified noun phrases, and verbs with clausal complements, while preserving the following desirable theoretical and computational properties: (i) syntactic representations are standard phrase-structure trees derived by a grammatical formalism; (ii) the mapping from syntax to semantics is fully compositional; and (iii) efficient parsing and generation algorithms remain applicable.