AW: AW: AW: Increasing interest in the HPSG conference

[Tibor Kiss]

Hi Carl, and everyone,

I took my impression from the following section of John's email. John is
explicitly talking about analyses which "wouldn't translate ... into simple
trees with simple deformations". And continues to refer to Hinrichs and
Nakazawa. I find it pretty hard to infer from this section that Gerald
Gazdar belongs to the group of people who proposes "simple trees with simple
deformations".

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

Carl writes:

> While we're on the subject, how did you manage to construe
> the word "standard" as meaning GB/MP? This is the kind of

Please note John's 'less on standard GB fare'.

> I'm curious what other examples you had in mind of
> unjustified attacks on non-existent GB/MP analyses. In my
> ...

Rest assured that I can mention several straw men from HPSG practioners, not
in written form, but in class lectures and personal communication. In most
cases, fossilized concepts of age-old analyses.

Best

T.