Philosophy of Syntax: Foundational Topics

This book is intended as a preliminary work for a uniform description of language, especially overall organization and architecture of grammar and its connection with semantics. An array of general logical intuitions, concerning the initial requirements for building and interpreting compound expressions, stemming from Frege, Husserl and Ajdukiewicz, is spelled out to form a general framework, allowing for critical evaluation of today’s leading paradigms, such as Generative Grammar, Montague Grammar or Type-Logical Grammar. The main message of the book is that categorial grammar is not only one of the competing theories of syntax, but – according to some general features – is the most plausible framework for logical syntax of natural language. With profound motivation the book proposes an original treatment of quantification and formulates insightful general principles of syntactic analysis.