About Parallel and Syntactocentric Formalisms: What the Encoding of Convergent Grammar into Abstract Categorial Grammar

Recent thought on grammatical architectures have underlined some discriminating features of the syntax-semantics interface: their syntactocentric nature when syntactic structures are mapped or transduced to semantics (and phonology); or their parallel nature, when semantics (and phonology) communicates with syntax via a nondirectional (or relational) interface. This duality arises for instance in dealing with in situ operators. The aim of this paper is to show how the essential content of one such parallel framework, convergent grammar (CVG), can be encoded within abstract categorial grammar (ACG), a generic framework which has mainly been used, until now, to encode syntactocentric architectures. Using such a generic framework allows us to relate the mathematical treatment of parallelism in CVG with the one of syntactocentrism in mainstream categorial grammar (CG).