[HPSG-L] Formalism/theory distinction: citations

[Olga Zamaraeva]

Dear colleagues,

In a number of papers, it is pointed out that there is an important clear
distinction between formalism and theory in HPSG: the formalism can be used
to encode a number of theories (e.g. with linearization and without, etc.).
See e.g. Bender 2008
<https://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/TLS/TLS10-2006/TLS10_Bender.pdf>
or Bender and Emerson 2020
<https://hpsg.hu-berlin.de/Projects/HPSG-handbook/PDFs/cl.pdf>, or Daniels
and Meurers 2004 <https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C04-1025.pdf>.
This distinction becomes crucial in implementations so it tends to come up
in computational linguistics literature, though the principle seems to be a
philosophical one.

I would like to know (i) who was the first to describe this distinction in
these terms; and (ii) where does the philosophical principle originate.  As
for (i), it appears it may have been Bender 2008 but it also seems like it
could be much earlier than that. Everything earlier than that that I found
does not talk about the distinction directly but rather seems to assume it
as a fact. As for Pollard and Sag, they do say that they "eschew extreme
formalization" in order to be able to talk about the theory but I am not
sure I could infer the distinction from that?

I'd be grateful for any thoughts or references!

Yours,
-- 
Olga Zamaraeva