AW: AW: Increasing interest in the HPSG conference

[Tibor Kiss]

Hi,

although I am generally sympathetic to the idea of presenting linguistic
analyses in a fashion allowing not only the in-crowd to understand them, I
find John Nerbonne's comment scary for two reasons.

1) We had a nice little discussion going on here, fluctuating around issues
of theory and formalism, and John informs us that we should ignore logical
issues. Will this help clarifying the problems? I don't think so.

2) Much worse is that John's email provides an example of a major fallacy,
being imprecise and thus allowing the construction of nice little straw men.
I have observed this before. Precision does not seem to be considered a sine
qua non if the other camp comes under attack.

>     - Hinrichs and Nakazawa's work on argument raising (as an
>     alternative to standard controlled VP analyses)

To the best of my knowledge (and I have some knowledge in infinite V syntax)
there is no *standard controlled VP analysis*, i.e. nobody claimed in a
GB/MP analysis that the pertinent constituents in infinite V syntax under
*raising or control* are VPs. Mostly, GB/MP people claimed that they are CPs
(making use of movement analyses as e.g. VP-to-SpecCP raising and subsequent
head movement out of SpecCP to account for the apparent [V V]-structure) or
IPs/TPs. HPSG analyses have devoted some time and effort to explicitly argue
against a CP analysis and *in favour* of a VP analysis. A distant
repercussion of this debate can be found in Reis and Sternfeld's excellent
deconstruction of Susi Wurmbrand's thesis in Linguistics (2004). In which
way does a non-existent analysis differ from vague conjectures and tacit
assumptions?

Some of you may think that I am turning this VP mouse into an elephant. But
it's not the first time that I've encountered unjustified attacks of
non-existent GB/MP analyses.

We should not brook this.

Best

T.