Resource Logics and Minimalist Grammars

This ESSLLI workshop is devoted to connecting the linguistic use of resource logics and categorial grammar to minimalist grammars and related generative grammars. Minimalist grammars are relatively recent, and although they stem from a long tradition of work in transformational grammar, they are largely informal apart from a few research papers. The study of resource logic, on the other hand, is formal and stems naturally from a long logical tradition. So although there appear to be promising connections between these traditions, there is at this point a rather thin intersection between them. The papers in this workshop are consequently rather diverse, some addressing general similarities between the two traditions, and others concentrating on a thorough study of a particular point. Nevertheless they succeed in convincing us of the continuing interest of studying and developing the relationship between the minimalist program and resource logics. This introduction reviews some of the basic issues and prior literature. 1 The interest of a convergence What would be the interest of a convergence between resource logical investigations of language and the minimalist tradition of transformational grammar? On the one hand, we might expect that the formal nature of the resource logic tradition might prompt a better formal understanding of minimalist grammar, and with this better understanding we might obtain insight into computational questions and models of human language processing. The computation of a parse may be regarded as the demonstration of a theorem, in a context where we can study a broad range of results relating to syntactic analysis (parsing), semantics, learning and generation. Theorem proving techniques, type unification and other algorithms studied in resource logic may apply here. The generative grammar tradition may also benefit from the resource logic setting by obtaining a good, formal connection with formal semantic proposals that quite directly relate to the Montague tradition. In the resource logic description of syntax, this so-called Montague semantics is really close to syntactic structure (this “semantics” is nothing but a reference calculus and therefore according to the generative approach is Presented at the 11th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, ESSLLI‘99, Utrecht, August 99 as an introduction to the workshop on Resource Logics and Minimalist Grammars organized by the authors.