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Hi all. I've been following this discussion with interest. One remark by
Emily Bender caught my attention. She writes:<br>
<dl>
<dd>"From my point of view, GB/MP is more abstract than HPSG in at
least
<dd>two ways: (1) it is less precise, in that many of the principles
<dd>etc. that make a GB/MP grammar "go" are only codified in
prose, and
<dd>often not explicitly spelled out at all and (2) while HPSG is
shaped
<dd>by an aspiration to performance-plausible competence grammar, GB/MP
<dd>isn't." <br>
<br>
</dl>My comment is about Bender's remark (1). It si true that, compared
to all the claims made in Minimalist analyses, HPSG has an explicit
explicitly spelled out way of dealing with features and unification.
Moreover, eveything in the theory has an explicit ontological status,
which is where I find the robustness of the theory: every object in the
theory is assigned to a type. Nothing of that sort can be said about
GB/Minimalism/PP. Presumably, linguistic principles, stated as
constraints on types, should also find their place in the ontology of
HPSG. The principle that requires the value of ARGST to be identical to
the concatenation of SUBJ and COMPS, for instance, is one such explicit
statement of a theoretical constraint on all signs (it is part of a
theory because things could have been otherwise, right? It is not a
constraint that sprouts from the formalism adopted, it is imposed by us
as a hypothesis about what a possible sign is). However, there are many
other principles that have not been yet formalized as types, and are
still in "prose". As far as I know, that is still the case with
the Binding Theory in HPSG. It is very clear what the notion of o-command
employed in Pollard & Sag 1992 is, and how to define it over an AVM,
but Principle A (for instance) is still stated in prose (one can
formalize it as a set of AVMs with all possible occurrences of
antecedents an anaphors in o-command relations, but that is not a
principle any more!). My feeling is that HPSG has been steadily enriched
with 'functional' or 'relational' notions and principles which have a
hard time finding their place among the traditional set of types and
constraints. They may be suitable for computational implementations, but
that does not mean that they have a place in the formal ontology of the
theory. That is just prose written in binary code. <br>
<br>
I have muloled over these issues for a long time, so I would appreciate
comments, corrections, or suggestions on these ideas. Even though a
complete formalization of the theory as constraints on types is the Holly
Grail which all HPSGers should pursue, I think we should keep ourselves
hones, and realize that we are not there yet.</html>