Categorial Semantics For LFG

A categorial semantics for Lexical-khmctional Grammar provides a means for semantic interpretation of sentences of natural language that is appropriately constrained both syntactically and semantically. The f-structure of LFG provides a cross-lingnistically uniform format for representing syntactic information; constraining a derivation with respect to the f-structure rather than a phrase structure tree allows reference to relevant functional syntactic information without requiring construction of a phrase structure tree whose form is (often dubiously) motivated on semantic grounds. Additionally, a categorial semantics constrains semantic derivations appropriately, obviating the need for an appeal to wellformedness conditions on the resulting semantic representation.