Autonomization of Monoidal Categories

Abstract

We define the free autonomous category generated by a monoidal category and study some of its properties. From a linguistic perspective, this expands the range of possible models of meaning within the distributional compositional framework, by allowing nonlinearities in maps. From a categorical point of view, this provides a factorization of the construction in [Preller and Lambek, 2007] of the free autonomous category generated by a category.