On the Ontological Nature of Syntactic Categories in Categorial Grammar

We address the ontological nature of syntactic categories in categorial grammar. Should we interpret categories as being a model of some actual grammatical reality, or are they merely part of an empirical model, one that attempts to capture the range of data, but without making any ontological commitments. This distinction, which is not often made, is important for determining the goals of formal grammar research. We evaluate this question within the context of a particular grammatical phenomenon, the modeling of premodifier ordering. We compare the categorial grammar treatment of this phenomenon with empirical statistical approaches to the same problem. We show that the whereas both models are equally empirically adequate, the statistical model is more generalizable and learnable, and thus advantageous as a realistic model.