SOME EXTENSIONS OF MONTAGUE GRAMMAR

Abstract

This chapter discusses some extensions of Montague grammar. This is an attempt to make intelligible some mechanisms that, when added to the grammatical framework created by Montague, permit the treatment of a variety of English constructions—especially those involving sentence embedding. It highlights an element such as the abstraction operator of type-theoretic logics into the syntactic analysis of several kinds of complements and presents the development of Montague's program by exploiting strategies of direct decomposition rather than along the transformational lines followed by Partee. The chapter presents the syntactic theory in an informal but readable way. Like that draft, this one sacrifices rigor for intelligibility and omits a presentation of the semantic component. The first thing in making a Montague grammar for a language is to determine the system of grammatical categories. This is done by designating certain indices to represent primitive categories and choosing a collection of complex indices having the form A/nB, where A and B may be any category indices, primitive or complex, and n may be any natural number.