Fwd: linear and non-linear terms

[Carl Pollard]

Hi Ash,

>
I was just wondering what kind of linguistic motivation there is for
banning vacuous abstraction, if there is in fact any. Isn't a lambda term
with vacuous abstraction just another kind of constant function?
>>

Right, so you would ban vacuous abstraction in some domain where you
wanted to make sure that taking a different argument was sure to
give a different result; or to put it another way, if a \not= b
then you are guaranteed f(a) \not= f(b). For example, if you treat
intensions of verbs as propositional functions, you want to be
sure that walk'(kim) and walk'(sandy') are distinct propositions.

More generally, in a system where taking an arguemnt has the effect
of building a "structured object", banning vacuous abstraction
guarantees that the parts of the structured objevts built are in some
sense recoverable.

Carl