good news from generative grammarians (fwd)

[Ivan A. Sag]

Hi Chris,

I was wondering, along with Ash, whether the professor in question here was
you. If so, I congratulate you on training a student with such curiosity and
dedication.

In various settings, I've encountered claims about the notational variance,
inclusion, etc. of HPSG and/in GB, P&P and MP.  I would be very interested if
you had some results (proofs, etc.) about the equivalence of MP and HPSG. I
also wonder if you have seen the excellent (pointed) discussion of the
relation between constraint-based frameworks like HPSG on one hand and the
`Minimalist Program' on the other by Johnson and Lappin:

David Johnson and Shalom Lappin. 1999. Local Constraints vs. Economy.
Stanford: CSLI Publications.

This is a must-read for anyone entering into a discussion of the relation
between these frameworks, in my opinion.

I hope we can have a productive discussion of these issues.

All best,
Ivan
	


------- Forwarded Message
From: Ash Asudeh <asudeh at csli.Stanford.EDU>
To: Liz Coppock <lizziecoppock at yahoo.com>
cc: HPSG <hpsg-l at lists.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: Re: good news from generative grammarians


Hi Liz

I can see the usefulness of your professor's comments (Chris Kennedy, by
an chance?) in trying to relate unfamiliar formalisms to a more familiar
one ("generative grammar" -- I agree with Tom Wasow that this is annoying,
because although at this point the term has largely become a positive
buzzword, by using it in opposing GB/MP to HPSG, LFG, RG, you name it, it
pumps up the former, at the expense of the latter. I thought we were doing
science, not politics).

However, just because there are analogies between various frameworks, that
doesn't mean that one can be reduced to the other. Yes, to some extent
these are just differences in formalisms, but when theoretical constructs
are stated in formal terms (and "formal" could be ordinary English, but at
a sufficient level of precision), these differences matter. For example,
in many versions of HPSG, there are no traces and no movement. Movement is
the key explanatory operation in GB/MP. Although there are versions that
do without it (e.g., Koster, Brody), they still rely on traces mediating
the filler and the gap.

Also, too often the abstract nature of GB/MP has consisted purely of lack
of precision. But these are different concepts. A theory can be abstract
and still be precise in its predictions (general relativity comes to mind;
just about any theory in the hard sciences is abstract, but precise). I
think it is mischaracterizing HPSG to say that it is not abstract. After
all, nobody believes you have directed acyclic graphs in your head. But
HPSG is precise (as Emily's email pointed out).

It's fine to ignore the "messy details", but only if your theory is
*precise* enough to someday include more of the mess. I feel somewhat
confident in the abilities of HPSG, LFG, and to an extent GB (some
precision wouldn't hurt it, but there have been interesting attempts by
Stabler, Rogers, and others) to do this, but less confident in MP. That's
why I do the former and not the latter.

Here's the kind of lack of precision or espousal of abstractness, if you
would rather put it that way, that I think is problematic with Minimalism,
for instance: it is a theory where half the work is done by
feature-checking and movement, yet there is not any theory of features,
feature projection, feature checking, or feature movement that is precise
in any sense of the word.

Best,
Ash

On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, 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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