from empirical side to recipe for disaster

[Stephen M. Wechsler]

At 11:26 AM -0500 11/19/01, Detmar Meurers wrote:

>But the idea of linguists writing linguistic theories and expecting
>somebody else ("the mathematicians") to make sense of what they said
>sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Ok, but that's not exactly the situation we're talking about.  As far
as I can tell, people using LFG constraining equations (cp. ANY) know
exactly what those equations mean.  There is no problem interpreting
LFG grammars that contain them.  The question is whether there is
some other reason to avoid them.   Speaking to that issue, Mark says:

"There are far greater sources of computational inefficiency in
standard implementations of both LFG and HPSG than ANY values.  In other
words, it's not clear that apart from aesthetics, there is
any reason to worry about the fact that we can't give ANY values a simple,
clean declarative semantics."

Steve