Abstract

The focus of this research project is the development of a derivational system for event semantics over pregroup grammars. More concretely, it is shown how by extending the usual pregroup framework with a semantic layer and by assigning explicit event variables to the basic syntactic types of an expression, one can get semantic extraction from pregroup derivations without too many complications.
The resulting meaning is neo-davidsonian and conjunctivist in form, that is, the meaning is analysed in terms of events, and a single logical operator is used for meaning combination: the conjunction ∧.
Using conjunctions as sole mean of meaning combination makes it harder at first to analyse certain constructions, but this is a small price to pay for the level of generality and overall derivational simplicity that is obtained in the end by equating syntactic combination — pregroup contractions — with meaning conjunction.
The issue of having non-functional types in this work is circumvented by using a unification operation over event and entity variables rather than abstraction/application operations à la λ- calculus, usually used in formal semantics.