default inheritance

[Dick Hudson]

Dear HPSG list,
I was pleased to see Luis Casillas's message about default
unification/inheritance, and I very much hope it will provoke some
discussion on this list. It seems to me one of the most important issues in
linguistic theory.  Construction grammarians are divided for/against
defaults; Word Grammar is definitely and very strongly for, and so is
Cognitive Grammar; LFG doesn't seem to recognise it, nor in general do
theories that use Optimality; HPSG recognises it only in the type hierarchy.

Like Luis, I would like to know whether the only objections are
computational - the need to keep checking for overriding facts and the time
this takes in a serial computer system.

Dick Hudson

Richard (= Dick) Hudson

Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London,
Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT.
+44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108;
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm