The book examines to what extent the mediating relation between constituents and their
semantics can arise from combinatory knowledge of words. It traces the roots of Combinatory
Categorial Grammar and uses the theory to promote a Humean question in linguistics and
cognitive science: Why do we see limited constituency and dependency in natural languages
despite their diversity and potential infinity? A potential answer is that constituents and
dependencies might have arisen from a single resource: adjacency. The combinatory formulation
of adjacency constrains possible grammars.
