Question formal status of trees in H&GPSG (fwd)

[Andrew Carnie]

Hi All,

I hope some of you can shed light for me on something that is probably
patently obvious to all of you, but isn't clear to me as an outsider.

In early transformational grammars, trees were viewed as short hands for
derivational history. That is a tree  	S
				      /  \
				    NP    VP

was viewed as statement of the operation of replacing S with NP and VP.
Sometime later, (probably in late EST/early GB times when
transformations stop operating over strings but over combinations of
structurally related tree nodes), trees come to be viewed as manipulable
objects, that is, they are themselves a linguistic structure rather than
a retelling of derivational history, although they also serve that
function. In P&P and MP this becomes even more the case, where the sets
created by merge are themselves the *only* syntactic objects.

So, could someone give me the short and dirty version of what GPSG and or
HPSG think about the formal status of trees. I know they are
representations of features, but I'm really trying to look for the deeper
answer than that. Are they objects that can be manipulated or are they
merely records of the relationships between the feature structures or is
the whole question silly in the context of PSG assumptions.

I'm *SURE* that there are a million easily available sources on the topic,
but I'm hoping somebody will indulge my laziness and offer a brief
synopsis and perhaps pointer to where I should look. I offer as an excuse
the fact that it is 106oF here today, and I can't possibly be expected
to think for myself in such heat.

Best,

Andrew

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     O  O  O  O  O  		Andrew Carnie, Ph.D.
    <|\/|\/|\/|\/|>  		Asst. Professor of Linguistics
     =  =  =  =  =  		Department of Linguistics
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