Promoting interest in HPSG

[Farrell Ackerman]

rob having opened the door, i'll walk in.  the lexicalist community has
always struck me as too fragmented and therefore self-defeating: it is
arguably the case that differences have gotten reified as conferences
have ghettoized the communities, leading to mutual neglect of useful
analytic trends, several of which have already been mentioned - for  example.
i have in mind here the fertile typological trend in lfg (stochastic)
proposals
(hpsg, of course, is not without its typologically oriented researchers -
so, to name
a suggestive few that come to mind there are kathol's articles
crysmann's thesis (book), weshler and zlatic's book, monachesi's forthcoming
book, malouf's book, etc. but somehow i don't get the impression that such
work really guides research or reflects a prevailing research direction
in hpsg as similarl work does in lfg) or the rich tradition of exploring
lexical
organization in terms of type-hierarchies in hpsg (which finds few analogues
in lfg, although there is a suggestive proposal in the new zealand lfg
conference)
or the adaptation of hpsg to address constructional aspects of grammar
(a perspective on grammar analysis less recognized in lfg than in hpsg, as
far as i can
tell.)   beyond being driven by research programs and interests that don't
appear
to be cross-fertilizing (to say the least), with the exception of the less
formal
proponents of construction grammar, there appears to be a disconnect from
the language development literature on the part of both lfg and hpsg (i
don't know
how fg stands on this.)  this is clear from the sparse list of references to
language acquisition on the hpsg language acquisition website:

http://www.sfu.ca/~dmellow/HPSGBibliography.html

it became particularly apparent to me last winter when i
ran a seminar series on the status of poverty of the stimulus arguments for
the
center for human development at ucsd.  it was clear from all of the invited
talks
(some folks representing intriguing variations on the standard view
couldn't participate
because of scheduling conflicts)

http://chd.ucsd.edu/seminar.WI04.htm

that there are common criticisms and compelling results against standard
(ill-supported)
beliefs about the poverty of the stimulus arguments that have become folkloric
in the cognitive science literature and, as importantly, these criticisms
and results largely conform to the expectations of developmentalists and
many well-established researchers in cognitive (neuro-)science.  so,
the developmentalists and cognitive (neuro-)scientists heard (with great
interest and appreciation) common intuitions,
complaints, research proposals disguised by theory particular assumptions:
i got
the impression that - to paraphrase a cliche' - this audience heard one
people divided by
numerous languages, leaving the cognitive (neuro-)science community here
without a coherent theoretical linguistic community to turn to.   so, i
guess, whatever the fates of the proliferating and competing conferences,
it seems to me that some serious attention should given to creating forums
in which there is synergistic cross-theoretical dialogue among constraint
based lexicalist/constructionist researchers on typology, the structure of
the lexicon, (and other topics that others have already mentioned) as well
on explicitly exploring and developing the connections of our community to
the much
larger cognitive (neuro-)science community.  in sum, these comments relate
less to
the narrow issue of how to increase interest in hpsg conferences and hpsg,
than in
(following my interpretation of rob's suggestion) how to make the hpsg
world part of a larger and more interactive linguistic and cognitive
science community.

-farrell