fate of SPEC and mutual selection

[Ulrich Koch]

Hi everybody,

David Baxter wrote:

> We are implementing an HPSG-based English grammar and hoping to avoid the
> cycles introduced by mutual selection such as that between a determiner
> and noun using the SPR and SPEC features in Pollard & Sag 1994. We notice
> that in Sag's recent "English Relative Clauses" paper, this selection
> appears to be only one-way - the SPEC feature is gone.
>
> Could someone please send us (a pointer to) an argument motivating the
> elimination of SPEC and/or an explanation of how the work done by SPEC in
> PS94 is done in grammars without SPEC?

I can't say I've really worked on HPSG grammars for subsets
of English, but the way I see it, the mutual selection using
SPEC in addition to SPR is motivated mostly for German.  I
don't see that one needs it for English.

Greetings,
Ulli

Ulrich Koch, comp. science and comp. ling. student
http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~koch/ (Deutsch/English/esperante)