Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

A-Z 163catchword1 A much-used word that implicitly interprets or evaluates a complex state of affairs. Acatchword has the effect of bringing solidarity to groups in society. Because catchwordshave a persuasive-agitative function, they are often the cause of public controversy, e.g.traditional values, equal opportunity, discrimination. A catchword can be understood as acondensed, linguistically fixed form of a topos.2 lemmacategorematic expressionIn Montague grammar, categorematic expressions are understood to be expressionswithout any (lexical) meaning of their own. To the extent that this is the case, they do notappear in the lexicon, but are only introduced via syntactic rules. The correspondingsemantic (interpretation) rules encompass the semantic effect of the categorematicexpressions in more extensive syntagms. Examples of categorematic expressions areconjunctions, articles and quantifiers.ReferenceMontague, R. 1974. Formal philosophy: selected papers of Richard Montague. New Haven, CT.categorial grammarGrammatical model developed by Polish logicians (Ajdukiewicz 1935) as an algorithmfor checking the wellformedness of sentences. Its application to natural language wasworked out primarily by J.Lambek, Y.Bar-Hillel, D. Lewis, and R.Montague. Newdevelopments of categorial grammar are represented by generalized categorial grammarand categorial unification grammar. All variants of categorial grammar arecharacterized by a specific category concept as well as by the parallel treatment of syntaxand semantics. The names of categories in categorial grammar encode the combinatorialproperties of linguistic expressions and as a consequence important aspects of theirdistribution and syntactic function. For instance, the category S/N expresses the fact thatan expression of this category can be combined with an expression of category N to forman expression of category S. (This corresponds to the traditional statement that a nounand a verb form a sentence.) The category ‘verb’ in contrast to S/N does not explicitly