Distinguishing Phenogrammar from Tectogrammar Simplifies the Analysis of Interrogatives

Oehrle (1994) introduced a categorial grammar architecture in which word order is represented using the terms of a typed λ-calculus and the syntactic type system is based on linear logic. In this paper, we use a variant of this architecture to analyze interrogatives in English and Chinese. We show that separating word order (phenogrammar) and syntactic combinatorics (tectogrammar) in this way brings out the underlying similarities between different question-forming strategies. In particular, the difference between wh extraction (overt movement) and wh in situ (covert movement) turns out to be purely phenogrammatical.

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