Promoting interest in HPSG

[Borsley R D]

Changing the subject slightly, I think it is worth emphasizing that
promoting HPSG is one thing and promoting the HPSG conference another.
Presumably most of us who work within HPSG would wish to promote the
framework. If so, the most important question about the annual conference
is whether it is a good way to promote HPSG. As various people have said,
this is not an easy question. There are other things, however, that
undoubtedly do something to promote HPSG. One is critical discussions of
P&P/minimalism of the kind that Lappin et al. produced. Another is papers
like Kim and Sag, which provide detailed criticisms of P&P/minimalist work
and show how HPSG can handle the facts better. Of course, it is not easy
to produce such things, but one thing that most of us could produce are
reviews of P&P/minimalist books. I would love to have more such reviews
for Journal of Linguistics. We had a very good review by Emily of the
Lasnik festscrift and we are expecting reviews of the Adger and Radford
minimalist textbooks from Ash, but all sorts of other things have gone
unchallenged. I would encourage people to think about the possibilities.
For example, there is a forthcoming minimalist textbook by Hornstein et
al. Maybe someone would like to review that when it appears.

Of course minimalists will try to ignore critical literature, but if there
is enough of it this will become impossible. Moreover, as Chomsky's input
declines, Minimalism will almost certainly fragment and it will no longer
be able to dominate the field. So I think the prospects for alternative
frameworks are not so bad.


Bob Borsley

--
Prof. Robert D. Borsley
Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
COLCHESTER CO4 3SQ, UK

rborsley at essex.ac.uk
tel: +44 1206 873762
fax: +44 1206 872198
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~rborsley