HPSG varia

[Danièle Godard]

(1) Submissions to conferences.
Going back to the question raised by Ivan , that of the participation of
HPSG-ists or LFG-ists to general conferences, I would like to say something
of my experience as a co-organizer of a regular conference. As you may
know, we organize a general syntax/semantics conference in Paris, every
other year (CSSP). In the calls for papers, we have always emphasized the
fact that we welcome papers from different 'frameworks'. This also means
that we do not favor  papers because of the approach they say they adopt.
Over the years, the result has not been that we get more abstracts from the
HPSG/LFG community, but that we get fewer syntactic abstracts altogether.
Does that mean that students and others turn to semantics (or the
syntax-semantics interface), because they want to eschew the feuds going on
in the field of syntax? Does that mean that people working in the dominant
'framework' (whatever reality it covers does not matter) in the US and some
european countries, are not interested in presenting their work to a
general audience? In any case, people working in lexicalist-non-dominant
approaches have not sent more abstracts over the years.

(2) The attraction of typology.
If the invitation to do more typological work is an invitation to turn to
the description of less well-known languages, and the search for cross-lx
generalizations, everybody will agree. On the other hand, it is also a
major challenge to produce precise and coherent descriptions of one
language (or one family of languages). There are not many such works, are
there? And nice broad generalizations seem to rarely work when one looks at
one language in a precise way.
The morale is that we need both types of works (if done seriously). And we
will see.

(3) Sociology of the field.
There are also different approaches in semantics (with a mixture of
analytic, theoretical and formal choices). Yet, semanticists seem to be
able to talk to each other. Why? Is it due to a difference between subject
matters and the training of the researchers (more formally oriented in
semantics, and thus less hindered by different formalizations), or to a
socio-historic accident? Or is it an illusion on my part?

Daniele