What is "categorial grammar"

n. (context linguistics English) a type of formal grammar of natural language syntax

Categorial grammar is a term used for a family of formalisms in natural language syntax motivated by the principle of compositionality and organized according to the view that syntactic constituents should generally combine as functions or according to a function-argument relationship. Most versions of categorial grammar analyze sentence structure in terms of constituencies (as opposed to dependencies) and are therefore phrase structure grammars (as opposed to dependency grammars).