"Generative" serves them right

[Carl Pollard]

Hi Elizabeth,


>
First, in light of the necessity to label the
framework associated with Chomsky (despite whatever
inaccuracy it might presuppose), I would like to
suggest "transformational grammar".
>>

How about "Chomkyan" (my preferred term)?  "Transformational grammar"
is not quite right, because of nontransformational work like Koster's
and Brody's.  What is criterial is that it follow, or profess to
follow, in outline, at least, whatever Chomsky says is now the way to
go. (Note that this is, by design, a sociological characterization.)
What I mean is that if Chomsky proposed tomorrow that something
mathematically indistinguishable from HPSG (or LFG, or categorial
grammar, or word grammar) was now the way to go (but using totally
different terminology), one year from now 50% of the people now doing
MP would be doing it, or profess to be doing it. (Just a personal
opinion, and obviously not a falsifiable empirical claim.)

>
Sergi, you say that Chomsky "reinvented" SLASH, and
called it 'probe'.  Do you mean that SLASH and 'probe'
are notational variants (laying aside who thought of
it first)?
>>

Historical note: in linguistics, at least as far as I know, Gazdar
deserves the credit (1981, Unbounded dependencies and coordinate
structures, though I remember seeing it in drafts by Gazdar
circulating in 1979), though he did not treat it as a feature. I think
the first person to do that, in print at least, was John Bear, about
1982. Ann Paulson and I independently implemented the same idea in an
early HPSG system at Hewlett-Packard Labs, I think summer of 1983 (we
found out about Bear's paper later).

But if you go outside linguistics to logic, SLASH is basically the
same idea as hypothetical reasoning in implicative logic, or
introducing an indeterminate in lambda calculus, so it is an idea that
goes back at least to the 30's and 40's

>
Are there other such analogies?
To what extent are they notational variances?
Where does an analogy between HPSG and
transformational grammar break down?
>>

There is an informal discussion of these very questions in the first 7
pages of some introductory lectures of mine (much improved by Georgia
Green over the orginals). (Let me know if you would like the .ps file.)

Carl