from Chris Kennedy

[Ash Asudeh]

Hi everyone

I'm really glad this got cleared up. I'm especially glad that Chris had
been misinterpreted, because he's always seemed like an extremely
fair-minded person to me, and it would have been totally out of character.

> Hopefully it's clear now that the "compatibility" of frameworks that I was
> talking about was really a question of whether (at least some) theoretical
> claims in GB/MP about lexical properties, syntactic structures, etc. can be
> formally captured using AVMs (or similar representational frameworks).

Right, if you want a feature-driven theory, you may as well import some
stuff from frameworks that have concerned themselves with this for some
time.

> Let me conclude by saying that I do very much think that the larger question
> Liz asks about the relation between the grammatical frameworks HPSG and GB/MP
> is a pretty damn interesting one, and definitely worth exploring. It's
> something that I've often asked myself, and it's a question that I've
> (obviously) tried to encourage my students to ask.  (Though I also think that
> it's important to have consistency in framework when training students to do
> syntactic analysis --- maybe this is why I'm a "die-hard generative grammar
> guy".)  I highly doubt that the relation is going to turn out to be one of
> equivalence or notational variance, though, so I think Ivan is going to have
> to wait a long time for his proofs.

I think this is an interesting question too, but there has to be a
suitable formalization of Minimalism to compare things too. Now, such
things do exist: beside David and Shalom's stuff, there's the ESSLLI
course that Christian Retore and Ed Stabler gave at Utrecht, which
included a course reader with several such papers, mainly using some kind
of Lambek calculus. Bob Levine has also mentioned a Groningen thesis by
Veenstra to me.

In this vein, let me just point out that what I feel to be an error with
some recent snippets I've picked up here and there: feature-checking in
Minimalism can't be just unification. There is a kind of feature
accounting (i.e., resource sensitivity) that must be taken into
consideration. Simple unification, it seems to me, would allow multiple
Goals to satisfy the same Probe, or in general multiple things to satisfy
the same feature checking requirement.

Returning to Chris's paragraph above, I totally agree that students should
be given consistent syntactic training, be it in HPSG or P&P.
Flip-flopping between formalisms at the undergraduate level will only lead
to confusion, dismay, terror, and a rejection of linguistics.

As for Chris being a die-hard generative grammar guy, aren't we all? It
should be pointed out, too, that it's not all that easy to move between
formalisms when one has had a large part of one's training in one
particular formalism. It would be extremely hard for me to write a
Minimalist paper (and I don't mean because it's imprecise -- I mean
because I'm not used to thinking that way).

Lastly, his course looks pretty good, I must say.

Best,
Ash