empirical basis, typology, and gradience

[Carl Pollard]

Folks,

>
> Correct me if I am wrong again, but my impression is that work in HPSG has
> concentrated too much on analyses of a single phenomenon in a single
> language, too much for my taste, that is.

I disagree with this assessment: good empirical work on theoretically
interesting phenomena in my experience is exactly what makes it
possible to have meaningful discussions across frameworks.
>>

I agree with Detmar here. Inductive generalization has to generalize
FROM vast numbers of detailed, specific observations.

>
> don't know enough about it). The hierarchical lexicon is a very powerful
> tool to do typology and contrastive linguistics,

Has this "very powerful tool" ever been used for typological work?  If
so, I'd appreciate a pointer.
>>

The first HPSG hierarchical lexicon was implemented in FRL at HPSG
Labs ca. 1984. Back then we (well, I, anyway---maybe I am just assuming
my colleagues Dan Flickinger, Tom Wasow et al. thought of it the same
way I did) just thought of it as a convenient encoding of certain kinds
of constraints, and that is how I still think of it. In terms of
feature logic, saying that the species s1, ,,,,, sn are daughters
of s in a sort hierarchy is just to define s as the disjoint union
of the si, i.e. to say

    s \def= s1 \/ ... \/ sn

and

        si /\ sj = false  (forall i,j = 1, ..., n)

I don't insist on a set-theoretic interpretation of this; it can be
interpreted into any type theory with coproducts. But no matter what
you interpret it into, it doesn't seem to me to have anything to do
with the nebulous (to me, anyway) concept of markedness.


> to it one can have a beautiful theory of markedness.

To have a theory of markedness, there must be something called
markedness to have a theory of. It has never been clear to me that
there is such a thing. Do any branches of science outside of
linguistics make use of a notion of markedness? Most mammals bear live
young, but the platypus and the echidna lay eggs.  So are they MARKED
mammals? Is giving birth to live young a DEFAULT for mammals? I am not
aware that these notions have found their way into the vocabulary of
zoological taxonomy; instead one just sets up a subsort of mammals --
monotremes -- with only two species. How are words different from
mammals in this respect?

Carl