Incremental interpretation and combinatory categorial grammar

Abstract

The paper is organised around a particular problem of ana­ phoric definite reference. A solution to this problem requires sen­ tence processing which allows semantic representations to be evaluated incrementally, as a phrase is read from left to right. The paper shows how a proposal made by Mellish (1985), to regard incremental semantic evaluation as a constraint satisfaction task, can provide a natural solution to the problem of reference. The incorporation of Combinatory Categorial Grammar allows a straightforward relationship to be stated between the incremen­ tally assembled syntactic and semantic representations.