Historical Notes
The basic ideas of categorial grammar date from work by Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (in 1935) and Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (in 1953). In 1958, Joachim Lambek introduced a syntactic calculus that formalized the function type constructors along with various rules for the combination of functions. This calculus is a forerunner of linear logic in that it is a substructural logic. Montague grammar uses an ad hoc syntactic system for English that is based on the principles of categorial grammar. Although Montague's work is sometimes regarded as syntactically uninteresting, it helped to bolster interest in categorial grammar by associating it with a highly successful formal treatment of natural language semantics. More recent work in categorial grammar has focused on the improvement of syntactic coverage. One formalism which has received considerable attention in recent years is Steedman and Szabolcsi's combinatory categorial grammar which builds on combinatory logic invented by Moses Schönfinkel and Haskell Curry.
There are a number of related formalisms of this kind in linguistics, such as type logical grammar and abstract categorial grammar.
Read more about this topic: Categorial Grammar
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