JoLLI Special Issue on New Directions in Type-theoretic Grammars
GUEST EDITOR: REINHARD MUSKENS

In 1961 Haskell Curry published his by now famous paper on
'Some Logical Aspects of Grammatical Structure'. In this paper he
makes a distinction between the 'tectogrammatics' and
'phenogrammatics' of language (a distinction similar to that between
abstract syntax and concrete syntax in compiler theory). The
tectogrammatics of an expression reflects the way in which the
expression is /built/, while the phenogrammatics is the way it
/appears/. On the basis of this distinction Curry argues
against directionality in the type system used for language
description. In 1953 Bar-Hillel had introduced a distinction between
categories seeking material to their right and categories seeking
material to the left, a distinction that was taken over in Lambek's
(1956) pivotal work on categorial grammar, but in Curry's
architecture phenogrammatic structure can take care of word order,
making directionality unnecessary.

While Curry's insights never quite made it into the mainstream of
type-theoretic grammar, they have for a long time formed an
important undercurrent. Recently this undercurrent has surfaced and
since the turn of the century there has been a heightened activity
within a series of type-theoretical formalisms that could be called
"Curryesque". These formalisms, which bear a family resemblance to
each other, adopt the pheno/tecto distinction and undirectedness in
one way or another and claim various descriptive and formal
advantages over more traditional approaches.

Such Curryesque approaches to type-theoretic grammar were the topic
of a recent interdisciplinary workshop held in Dublin as part of the
European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI)
2007 (see http://let.uvt.nl/general/people/rmuskens/ndttg/ for
more information). In the wake of this workshop there will be a
special issue of the Journal of Logic, Language, and
Information on new directions in type-theoretic grammars. We invite
papers on all logical, linguistic, and computational aspects of
type-theoretic grammars in which the pheno/tecto distinction plays a
prominent role. Papers combining linguistic considerations with
more formal ones are especially welcome.


Submission Format

Contributions should be submitted electronically to Reinhard
Muskens, email: r.a.muskens@uvt.nl. Authors are strongly encouraged
to prepare their contribution with the help of LaTeX, making use of
the Journal's style file. Papers should not exceed 20 pages and can
be excluded if they do. However, good papers for which there is no
room in the special issue will be recommended to the Managing Editor
for publication in other issues.


Important Dates

Submission deadline: 1 February 2008
Referee reports due: 1 April 2008
Final version due: 1 June 2008
Publication date: Autumn 2008