AW: Increasing interest in the HPSG conference

[anne abeille]

Hi John

thank you for your message
which I am most sympathetic with;

In our Language paper with Daniele Godard
on French auxiliaries, we have tried precisely this:
give the analysis in an informal fashion
(sections 1 to 6)
and keep the HPSG analysis for a separate more
technical section

as for the " HPSG highlights" that you mention,
I don't mind being the "et al" when you talk about Clitics,
but when you mention Bouma et al's work on adjuncts,
you should know that it builds on Abeille and Godard 's 1997
paper on French negation,
where we challenge Pollock Neg functional head
and V raising analysis
and propose an Adverb as Complement analysis

best
Anne Abeillé
>
>  We're getting mails with the heading on how to increase interest in HPSG
>  (among linguists), and the mails themselves concern topics such as
>  the intuitionist interpretation of the logics underlying the special
>  formalism in which linguistic descriptions, including abstract (theoretical)
>  descriptions, are about.
>
>I submit that there simply is no LARGE community of linguists interested in
>this.  There  is a small, very capable community organized as MOL (Mathematics
>of Language), and maybe HPSG work primarily aimed at the mathematical
>foundations of grammar should team up with them.  I've attended two of their
>meetings, and the attendees are both good and receptive.  Formal grammar is
>also good.  But also small in numbers.
>
>If you don't know me, and feel tempted to launch into an ad hominem about
>scientific precision, please take a look at my web site.  I agree about the
>need for scientific precision.  But I think HPSG focuses so much on
>metaissues of formalism, interpretation and mathematical foundations
>that the average working linguist tunes out.   And I think that the community
>looks too slavishly to the GB community for its notions of what interesting
>syntactic issues are.
>
>My suggestions for keeping up GENERAL linguistic interest, on the other hand:
>
>1. Encourage a level of presentation that non-HPSGers can follow, at least
>roughly.  It is standard in (some) other exact sciences to provide
>presentation at intuitively accessible levels and to keep nitty-gritty
>details separate.  Normally people do not expect audiences for talks to grasp
>six to ten new, interlocking equations (or descriptions, in the HPSG case) in
>dozens of variables and constants, and understand it precisely.    You leave
>the nuts and bolts to appendices in the papers.   The presentation
>should normally constrast analyses proposed with others (those of rivals!),
>again, at an intuitively clear level.  I mean here not only oral
>presentations, but also papers, where I'd suggest that we encourage a
>style in which analyses are explained at an intuitive level, and where
>technical details are kep separate.
>
>Frankly, I suspect that HPSG papers will become more palatable to many
>others, if the advice above were followed.  I also suspect that the many
>people interested in syntax, but not in the mathematical foundations of
>syntactic theory, would also tune in -- people whose primary interest is
>psycholinguistics, language acquisition, language contact, comparative
>syntax, formal semantics, etc.  I added some remarks on this to a recent
>review I did of Ginzburg and Sag (see my web page).
>
>2. It would also help if the HPSG field focused less on standard GB
>fare, i.e. binding theory (where HPSG & GB are quite similar), control,
>long-distance dependency, etc. (I do not exempt myself from this criticism).
>Naturally one needs to be able to handle these things, but the
>Chomskyan query "Where are the new facts?"  is also quite reasonable
>to all of us as scientists.  Over the years I've seen any number of HPSG
>analyses fail to make the impact I thought they deserved in spite of genuine
>innovation---perspectives that wouldn't translate simply into binary trees
>with simple deformations, places therefore where alternative perspectives
>might have a chance of being profoundly different.
>
>    - Malouf's work on gerunds and cross-categorization
>    - Kathol's work on combinatorics vs. surface constituency (following
>    on Dowty and Reape)
>    - Hinrichs and Nakazawa's work on argument raising (as an
>    alternative to standard controlled VP analyses)
>    - Miller's (Godard, Sag, Monachesi, ..) et al. work on clitics
>    - the work on German fronting that I was involved in, and that
>     was improved by Mueller, Meurers and de Kuthy
>    - the work on adjuncts by Bouma, Sag and Malouf
>
>I realize that the GB field is a moving target, but they repeatedly stick to
>very simple trees as the only analytical device where HPSG offers a
>lot more (maybe too much, but maybe that's a separate issue).  If HPSG
>cannot provide inisightful, radically innovative perspectives on core GB
>issues, or, alternatively, insightful analyses on other interesting syntactic
>issues, something is wrong.
>
>3. We need to lose the bitter, and sometimes arrogant edge on the polemics.
>GB/Minimalism simply is the dominant view and--like it or not--it is more than
>reasonable for a young syntactician to aim to make her mark there, and to
>regard most of the alternatives as things to get to later.  Alternatives have
>to prove their worth, dominant theories don't.   And isn't this what most
>young HPSGers do vis-a-vis the even less popular frameworks, say Diver
>functionalism, or word grammar?  You can't get to all of it.
>
>    Maybe the case of formal semanticists is the most revealing.  This
>    group is NOT technically ill-educated, but a large number of semanticists
>    chooses to embed their work in GB syntax, simply to be taken seriously
>    by a broad range of potentially interested people.
>
>John
>--
>John Nerbonne, Information Science              +31 50 363 58 15
>P.O.Box 716, University of Groningen        FAX +31 50 363 68 55
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