AW: AW: Increasing interest in the HPSG conference

[Tibor Kiss]

Hi folks,

sorry for the confusion, Andrea is my girlfriend's name. Outlook mixed up
our identifications.

Best

Tibor

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: owner-hpsg-l at lists.Stanford.EDU
> [mailto:owner-hpsg-l at lists.Stanford.EDU] Im Auftrag von Carl Pollard
> Gesendet: Mittwoch, 30. Juni 2004 13:28
> An: afelpado at compuserve.de; hpsg-l at lists.Stanford.EDU
> Betreff: Re: AW: Increasing interest in the HPSG conference
>
>
> Hi Andrea,
>
> In reply to my assertion
>
> > A more important distinction than whether the tree is
> gussied up into
> > a feature structure is whether the tree is viewed as (a) a model
> > (structural representation) of a sign, or (b) as a proof
> (derivation)
> > of a sign. I believe this is a (maybe even THE) fundamental
> issue that
> > has to be clarified
>
> you said:
>
>   My personal answer to Carl's question is as follows: quite
>   obviously, trees are what McCawley conceived them to be,
>   i.e. structural representations.
>
> But if it were so obvious, it would not be such a bone of
> contention. It SEEMED obvious to me too for many years, then
> I wondered about it for a few years, and now I believe it is false.
>
> You went on to say:
>
>   In the 1980s, it was somewhat vague whether GB should be considered
>   derivational, and explicitly representational variants like Koster's
>   existed, but then Chomsky and Pollock argued that certain well-known
>   facts about adverb position, negation and the like could not be
>   handled in a representational framework. An actual 'proof' in the
>   broadest sense of this term has never been given (and actually
>   cannot be given, cf. Kim and Sag).
>
>
> There are no proofs in science, except for refutations in the
> form of counterexamples.
>
> >
> What is more, Lasnik (2000, cf. my short notice in JL) has
> pointed out that the derivational analyses offered by Chomsky
> and others do not work!
> >>
>
> The MP conception of derivation is not the only one. For
> example, categorial grammar is also derivational.
>
> In response to my assertion
>
> > [GPSG] wasn't, as Uszkoreit and Peters proved. (The
> context- freeness
> > of GKPS was bought at the cost of imposing a linguistically
> > unmotivated prohibition on application of a given metarule
> more than
> > once in a derivation.)
>
>
> you replied
>
>   You seem to assume that the price to be paid for the
> restrictiveness was to
>   high.
>
> It is too high because it renders ungrammatical sentences like
>
>   A violin this well-crafted, even the most difficult sonatas are
>   easy [to play __ on __].
>
>   I have a personnel issue that I'm not sure who
>   [to talk to __ about __].
>
> Moreover GKPS generated only CFL's, and as far as I know
> nobody has ever found a mistake in Shieber's proof that Swiss
> German (as a stringset) is not a CFL. So GKPS as a package
> deal wasn't sustainable. (I don't think HPSG is either but
> for different reasons. )
>
> >
> I flatly reject this conclusion.
> >>
>
> I urge you to reconsider.
>
> >
> In any case, restricting metarules is
> much more restrictive than a bag of completely unrestricted
> lexical rules, inheritance hierarchies, features and types of
> dubious origin, let alone
> list- and set-valued features.
> >>
>
> But how should they be restricted? You can't just rule out
> good sentences in the interest of keeping your formalism
> lean. AS for the bag you mention, in spite of having omce
> presented a WCCFL paper called "PSG without metarules, I no
> longer see much difference between metarules and lexical
> rules. And there are ways of doing the other things you
> mention (inheritance hierarchies, features and types, list
> and set values) that make them not seem so louche. Which
> would you give up?
>
>
> >
> If I remember correctly, there was no question of type vs.
> token-identity cropping up in GPSG.
> There weren't even AVMs in GPSG.
> >>
>
> This is true and to GPSG's credit, and I would advocate
> neither the type vs. token identity distinction nor AVMs.
>
> But I would not advocate trees qua structural representations either.
>
>
> Best
>
> T.
>
>