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Language can be approached from many points of view. Indeed, its very vastness prevents one from seeing all of it from a single perspective. It is for this reason that the logician H. B. Curry, in his intriguing, though somewhat neglected article "Some Logical Aspects of Grammatical Structure', compares the study of language with the case of the six blind men and the elephant. According to the story, each blind man touched a different part of the animal, and the one who had it by the tail thought it was like a rope and the one who touched a leg claimed it was like a pillar, and so on. In the study of language, however, it sometimes seems as if the blind men are not really blind: they merely close their eyes to the reality of the elephant. A case in point is the study of morphology, where, after a period of relative neglect, there is now a vigorous ongoing debate about the properties that a restrictive general theory of word-formation and inflection should have. In this paper, we take the position that some recent proposals are restrictive only because they ignore many of the readily available data. This includes most varieties of categorial grammar, insofar as they deal with morphology at all. The main goal of this paper is to propose an extension of categorial grammar in order to enable it to deal with the complexities found in the morphological systems of natural languages.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-6878-4_8

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