Linguistic Analysis, Description, and Typological Exploration with Categorial Grammar (TheBench Guide)

TL;DR

TheBench is a tool for exploring monadic structures in natural language using categorial grammar, emphasizing semantics and composition to analyze syntax and predicate-argument structures across languages.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to categorial grammar by turning application into composition and requiring dual command relations, enhancing analysis of syntax and semantics.

Findings

Enables comparison of diverse languages through category-based analysis

Integrates semantics deeply into syntactic structures via composition

Supports iterative development of grammar functions

Abstract

TheBench is a tool to study monadic structures in natural language. It is for writing monadic grammars to explore analyses, compare diverse languages through their categories, and to train models of grammar from form-meaning pairs where syntax is latent variable. Monadic structures are binary combinations of elements that employ semantics of composition only. TheBench is essentially old-school categorial grammar to syntacticize the idea, with the implication that although syntax is autonomous (recall \emph{colorless green ideas sleep furiously}), the treasure is in the baggage it carries at every step, viz. semantics, more narrowly, predicate-argument structures indicating choice of categorial reference and its consequent placeholders for decision in such structures. There is some new thought in old school. Unlike traditional categorial grammars, application is turned into composition in monadic analysis. Moreover, every correspondence requires specifying two command relations, one on syntactic command and the other on semantic command. A monadic grammar of TheBench contains only synthetic elements (called `objects' in category theory of mathematics) that are shaped by this analytic invariant, viz. composition. Both ingredients (command relations) of any analytic step must therefore be functions (`arrows' in category theory). TheBench is one implementation of the idea for iterative development of such functions along with grammar of synthetic elements.