AW: Increasing interest in the HPSG conference

[Borsley R D]

It is a bit odd to say that GB has 'very simple trees'. The proliferation
of phonologically empty functional heads and of movement processes
including so-called 'remnant movement' means that they are anything but
simple. I discuss a particularly bizarre example in the following:

Borsley, R.D. (2001), 'What do prepositional complementizers do?', Probus
13, 155-171

best

Bob Borsley



On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, John Nerbonne wrote:

> I haven't been too active in this community for 4-5 years, but the conference
> popularity issue bothered me a lot when I chaired the HPSG committee
> (1996-98), when I argued unsuccessfully for broader conferences.  So
> I'll chime in.  If you don't know me, please be assured that I write with
> sympathy for the general issue.  I'll be a big negative about some habits
> in presentation and in choice of issues.
>
> What's wrong with the following picture?
>
>   We're getting mails with the heading on how to increase interest in HPSG
>   (among linguists), and the mails themselves concern topics such as
>   the intuitionist interpretation of the logics underlying the special
>   formalism in which linguistic descriptions, including abstract (theoretical)
>   descriptions, are about.
>
> I submit that there simply is no LARGE community of linguists interested in
> this.  There  is a small, very capable community organized as MOL (Mathematics
> of Language), and maybe HPSG work primarily aimed at the mathematical
> foundations of grammar should team up with them.  I've attended two of their
> meetings, and the attendees are both good and receptive.  Formal grammar is
> also good.  But also small in numbers.
>
> If you don't know me, and feel tempted to launch into an ad hominem about
> scientific precision, please take a look at my web site.  I agree about the
> need for scientific precision.  But I think HPSG focuses so much on
> metaissues of formalism, interpretation and mathematical foundations
> that the average working linguist tunes out.   And I think that the community
> looks too slavishly to the GB community for its notions of what interesting
> syntactic issues are.
>
> My suggestions for keeping up GENERAL linguistic interest, on the other hand:
>
> 1. Encourage a level of presentation that non-HPSGers can follow, at least
> roughly.  It is standard in (some) other exact sciences to provide
> presentation at intuitively accessible levels and to keep nitty-gritty
> details separate.  Normally people do not expect audiences for talks to grasp
> six to ten new, interlocking equations (or descriptions, in the HPSG case) in
> dozens of variables and constants, and understand it precisely.    You leave
> the nuts and bolts to appendices in the papers.   The presentation
> should normally constrast analyses proposed with others (those of rivals!),
> again, at an intuitively clear level.  I mean here not only oral
> presentations, but also papers, where I'd suggest that we encourage a
> style in which analyses are explained at an intuitive level, and where
> technical details are kep separate.
>
> Frankly, I suspect that HPSG papers will become more palatable to many
> others, if the advice above were followed.  I also suspect that the many
> people interested in syntax, but not in the mathematical foundations of
> syntactic theory, would also tune in -- people whose primary interest is
> psycholinguistics, language acquisition, language contact, comparative
> syntax, formal semantics, etc.  I added some remarks on this to a recent
> review I did of Ginzburg and Sag (see my web page).
>
> 2. It would also help if the HPSG field focused less on standard GB
> fare, i.e. binding theory (where HPSG & GB are quite similar), control,
> long-distance dependency, etc. (I do not exempt myself from this criticism).
> Naturally one needs to be able to handle these things, but the
> Chomskyan query "Where are the new facts?"  is also quite reasonable
> to all of us as scientists.  Over the years I've seen any number of HPSG
> analyses fail to make the impact I thought they deserved in spite of genuine
> innovation---perspectives that wouldn't translate simply into binary trees
> with simple deformations, places therefore where alternative perspectives
> might have a chance of being profoundly different.
>
>     - Malouf's work on gerunds and cross-categorization
>     - Kathol's work on combinatorics vs. surface constituency (following
>     on Dowty and Reape)
>     - Hinrichs and Nakazawa's work on argument raising (as an
>     alternative to standard controlled VP analyses)
>     - Miller's (Godard, Sag, Monachesi, ..) et al. work on clitics
>     - the work on German fronting that I was involved in, and that
>      was improved by Mueller, Meurers and de Kuthy
>     - the work on adjuncts by Bouma, Sag and Malouf
>
> I realize that the GB field is a moving target, but they repeatedly stick to
> very simple trees as the only analytical device where HPSG offers a
> lot more (maybe too much, but maybe that's a separate issue).  If HPSG
> cannot provide inisightful, radically innovative perspectives on core GB
> issues, or, alternatively, insightful analyses on other interesting syntactic
> issues, something is wrong.
>
> 3. We need to lose the bitter, and sometimes arrogant edge on the polemics.
> GB/Minimalism simply is the dominant view and--like it or not--it is more than
> reasonable for a young syntactician to aim to make her mark there, and to
> regard most of the alternatives as things to get to later.  Alternatives have
> to prove their worth, dominant theories don't.   And isn't this what most
> young HPSGers do vis-a-vis the even less popular frameworks, say Diver
> functionalism, or word grammar?  You can't get to all of it.
>
>     Maybe the case of formal semanticists is the most revealing.  This
>     group is NOT technically ill-educated, but a large number of semanticists
>     chooses to embed their work in GB syntax, simply to be taken seriously
>     by a broad range of potentially interested people.
>
> John
>

--
Prof. Robert D. Borsley
Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
COLCHESTER CO4 3SQ, UK

rborsley at essex.ac.uk
tel: +44 1206 873762
fax: +44 1206 872198
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~rborsley