Yusuke Kubota

Gapping as like-category coordination

We propose a version of Type-Logical Categorial Grammar (TLCG) which combines the insights of standard TLCG (Morrill 1994, Moortgat 1997) in which directionality is handled in terms of forward and backward slashes, and more recent approaches in the CG literature which separate directionality-related reasoning from syntactic combinatorics by means of Ł-binding in the phonological component (Oehrle 1994, de Groote 2001, Muskens 2003). The proposed calculus recognizes both the directionality-sensitive modes of implication (/ and \) of the former and the directionality-insensitive mode of implication tied to phonological Ł-binding in the latter (which we notate here as |). Empirical support for the proposed system comes from the fact that it enables a straightforward treatment of Gapping, a phenomenon that has turned out to be extremely problematic in the syntactic literature including CG-based approaches.

Nonconstituent Coordination in Japanese as Constituent Coordination: An Analysis in Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar

Nonconstituent coordination poses a particularly challenging problem for standard kinds of syntactic theories in which the notion of phrase structure (or constituency) is taken to be a primitive in some way or other. Previous approaches within such theories essentially equate nonconstituent coordination with coordination of full-fledged clauses at some level of grammatical representation. I present data from Japanese that pose problems for such approaches and argue for an alternative analysis in which the apparent nonconstituents are in fact surface constituents having full-fledged meanings, couched in a framework called Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar (Kubota 2010, Kubota and Levine 2012, Kubota 2014).

Determiner Gapping as Higher-Order Discontinuous Constituency

We argue that an approach to discontinuous constituency via prosodic lambda binding initiated by Oehrle (1994) and adopted by some subsequent authors (de Groote, 2001; Muskens, 2003; Pollard, 2011) needs to recognize higher-order prosodic variables to provide a fully systematic treatment of two recalcitrant empirical phenomena exhibiting discontinuity, namely, split gapping involving determiners and comparative subdeletion. Once we admit such higher-order prosodic variables, straightforward analyses of these phenomena immediately emerge. We take this result to provide strong support for recognizing such higher-order prosodic variables in this type of approach. We also touch on the more general issue of alternative approaches to discontinuity in categorial grammar, and suggest that an approach that recognizes (possibly higher-order) prosodic functors like the one we propose here leads to a more principled treatment of certain interactions between phenomena exhibiting complex types of discontinuity than competing approaches.

The scope interpretation of complex predicates in Japanese: A unified lexicalist analysis

This paper proposes a unified analysis of adverb scope and quantifier scope phenomena in a lexicalist approach to complex predicates. I first observe that the availability of scope ambiguity for adverbs and for quantifiers always coincides for a given type of complex predicate, drawing on data from different kinds of compound verb constructions, the verbal noun-taking predicates and the nominative object construction. The challenge for a unified treatment in lexicalist frameworks comes from the fact that syntactic structures cannot be taken as the locus for representing the scope of adverbs and quantifiers, unlike in derivational frameworks where such an analysis is the most natural. Thus, a previous lexicalist analysis by Manning, Sag & Iida (1999) makes use of completely different mechanisms to account for adverb scope and quantifier scope, failing to capture the close parallel between them. I remedy this problem of Manning et al.s analysis by proposing a unified account of adverb scope and quantifier scope that crucially makes use of a slightly enriched semantic representation explicitly encoding the property of mono-/biclausality with respect to scopal phenomena. J. Linguistics 43 (2007), 489-530.

Pseudogapping as Pseudo-VP-Ellipsis

In this article, we propose an analysis of pseudogapping in Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar (Hybrid TLCG; Kubota 2010; Kubota and Levine 2012). Pseudogapping poses a particularly challenging problem for previous analyses in both the transformational and the nontransformational literature. We argue that the flexible syntax-semantics interface of Hybrid TLCG enables an analysis of pseudogapping that synthesizes the key insights of both transformational and nontransformational approaches, at the same time overcoming the major difficulties of each type of approach.

Pseudogapping as Pseudo-VP Ellipsis

In this article, we propose an analysis of pseudogapping in Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar (Hybrid TLCG; Kubota 2010; Kubota and Levine 2012). Pseudogapping poses a particularly challenging problem for previous analyses in both the transformational and the nontransformational literature. We argue that the flexible syntax-semantics interface of Hybrid TLCG enables an analysis of pseudogap-ping that synthesizes the key insights of both transformational and non-transformational approaches, at the same time overcoming the major difficulties of each type of approach.

Scope Parallelism in Coordination in Dependent Type Semantics

The scope parallelism in the so-called Geach sentences in right-node raising (Every boy admires, and every girl detests, some saxophonist) poses a difficult challenge to many analyses of right-node raising, including ones formulated in the type-logical variants of categorial grammar (e.g. Kubota and Levine (2015)). In this paper, we first discuss Steedman’s (2012) solution to this problem in Combinatory Categorial Grammar, and point out some empirical problems for it. We then propose a novel analysis of the Geach problem within Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar (Kubota and Levine 2015), by incorporating Dependent Type Semantics (Bekki 2014) as the semantic component of the theory. The key solution for the puzzle consists in linking quantifiers to the argument positions that they correspond to via an anaphoric process. Independently motivated mechanisms for anaphora resolution in DTS then automatically predicts the scope parallelism in Geach sentences as a consequence of binding parallelism independently observed in right-node raising sentences.