trees

Andrew Carnie carnie at U.Arizona.EDU
Wed Jun 30 14:38:35 UTC 2004


Hi All,

The debate between Tibor and Carl is one of great interest to me. But I'm
surprised at Tibor's assertions about the tree in HPSG. (Please forgive my
misunderstandings, because I'm still a total novice when it comes to
HPSG's formalisms.) To the extent that I understand AVMs, I would assert
-- perhaps very wrongly -- that the representation of a sentence's
featural content, both in terms of syntax and semantics is wholely in
the AVM for the root node (CP or S or whatever), in a manner similar to the
f-structure in LFG (for the semantics at least).
The big difference between an f-structure and the CP's AVM, it seems to
me, is that structural information about complements, specifiers, adjuncts
etc is included in it too (at least in the version I am most familiar with
-- which is admittedly the textbook version of SWB). As such the tree is
redundant in that it represents how that information was composed
from the lexical entries, but that information is also contained in the
AVM itself. When I first started reading HPSG (in
particular SWB), it felt to me like the tree was really a proof that the
AVM of the root node could be composed out of the AVMs of the lexical
entries in a manner consistant with the various constraints on the
relationships between the lexical entries and the AVMs of the constituents
that contain them.

WHen I apply my own derivational biases to the system, the proof-like
quality of the tree was almost a derivation (in fact can be read as such
if you construe local constraints as "rules" and build from the bottom of
the tree up. From my own biased point of view, then, the trees begin to
look like old style derivational histories rather than structural
representations. I would have guessed, if asked, that the way HPSG was
going was to a system without trees at all, where there would only be
constraints from AVMs to AVMs, because of this derivational quality of
trees.

Clearly, since the matter is one of the debate here, I'm totally wrong. I
look forward to being corrected. :)

Best,

Andrew



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	/ \			Andrew Carnie, Ph.D.
       /   \	  		Assoc. Professor of Linguistics
     	  / \    		Department of Linguistics
     	 /   \			Douglass 200E, University of Arizona
    	    / \			Tucson, AZ 85721
	   /   \
				Tel: (520) 621 2802  Cell: (520) 971 1166
				http://linguistics.arizona.edu/~carnie



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