good news from generative grammarians

[Emily Bender]

>From my point of view, GB/MP is more abstract than HPSG in at least
two ways: (1) it is less precise, in that many of the principles
etc. that make a GB/MP grammar "go" are only codified in prose, and
often not explicitly spelled out at all and (2) while HPSG is shaped
by an aspiration to performance-plausible competence grammar, GB/MP
isn't.  That is, HPSG is designed to be embeddable in an eventual
theory of performance (and in computational performance systems),
while GB/MP is said to be an abstract model of what people know about
language with no relation to how they use that knowledge.  As you
can probably tell from the way I've phrased it, I don't think that
GB/MP is better for being abstract in these ways. YMMV.

As for whether one could translate a GB/MP grammar into an HPSG
grammar, that depends on whether by "GB/MP" and "HPSG" we're talking
about theories or formalisms.  I believe that the theories (as they
are currently stated) are incompatible, no matter which current GB/MP
and which current HPSG theory one picks.  Formalisms are another
matter.  It should be possible although not necessarily comfortable to
reformulate the substance of any given theory from either camp in the
other's formalism.

Emily

Liz Coppock wrote
>
> One of my professors (a die-hard generative grammar
> guy) said, wrt HPSG (in a computational linguistics
> class), "we presuppose all this stuff."
>
> He indicated a conception of the two frameworks
> wherein one was just more abstract than the other, not
> concerned with all the messy details, but essentially
> compatible.
>
> I wonder what the people on this list have to say
> about the relationship between HPSG and generative
> grammar --
>
> Is his view accurate?
> In what sense(s) are the two frameworks compatible?
> Could there exist a mapping from any generative
> grammar theory to a corresponding HPSG theory?
> Is one more abstract than the other?
>
>
> Elizabeth Coppock
> Northwestern University
>
> --- Tibor Kiss <tibor at linguistics.ruhr-uni-bochum.de>
> wrote:
> > Hi everybody (as well as John N.),
> >
> > I just wanted to inform you that HPSG is no longer
> > ignored by famous
> > generative grammarians.  Prof. D. Pesetsky (Ferrari
> > P. Ward Professor of
> > Linguistics at MIT) writes in his recent (2000) LI
> > monograph (p. 11fn12):
> > "The proposal bears interesting similarities to
> > proposals within the G/HPSG
> > tradition ... which treat a wide variety of
> > syntactic relations as the
> > result of extremely local feature movement."
> >
> > Now they're talking ...
> >
> > T.
> >
> >
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Prof. Dr. Tibor Kiss -- Sprachwissenschaftliches
> > Institut
> > Ruhr-Universität Bochum, D-44780 Bochum
> > +49-234-3225114 // +49-177-7468265 //
> > +49-234-3214137 (fax)
> > You come here, you must think about minimalism
> >
>
>
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