AW: AW: Increasing interest in the HPSG conference

[Tibor Kiss]

Hi,

>   My personal answer to Carl's question is as follows: quite
>   obviously, trees are what McCawley conceived them to be,
>   i.e. structural representations.
>
> But if it were so obvious, it would not be such a bone of
> contention. It SEEMED obvious to me too for many years, then
> I wondered about it for a few years, and now I believe it is false.

Ok, that's an interesting topic to debate. I would like to see an argument
in favour of the opposite interpretation (derivational history).


> You went on to say:
>
>   In the 1980s, it was somewhat vague whether GB should be considered
>   derivational, and explicitly representational variants like Koster's
>   existed, but then Chomsky and Pollock argued that certain well-known
>   facts about adverb position, negation and the like could not be
>   handled in a representational framework. An actual 'proof' in the
>   broadest sense of this term has never been given (and actually
>   cannot be given, cf. Kim and Sag).
>
>
> There are no proofs in science, except for refutations in the
> form of counterexamples.

If you had known that it's me, you would have been aware that I am quite
often found on the vague side. But anyway, under proof I subsume things like
'English is not regular, Swiss German is not CFL' and the like.

In the case at hand, the question boils down to: what is the justification
for moving from a representational theory to a derivational theory?

> What is more, Lasnik (2000, cf. my short notice in JL) has
> pointed out that the derivational analyses offered by Chomsky
> and others do not work!
> >>
>
> The MP conception of derivation is not the only one. For
> example, categorial grammar is also derivational.

That doesn't free Chomsky and his likes.

> you replied
>
>   You seem to assume that the price to be paid for the
> restrictiveness was to
>   high.
>
> It is too high because it renders ungrammatical sentences like
>
>   A violin this well-crafted, even the most difficult sonatas are
>   easy [to play __ on __].
>
>   I have a personnel issue that I'm not sure who
>   [to talk to __ about __].
>
> Moreover GKPS generated only CFL's, and as far as I know
> nobody has ever found a mistake in Shieber's proof that Swiss
> German (as a stringset) is not a CFL. So GKPS as a package
> deal wasn't sustainable. (I don't think HPSG is either but
> for different reasons. )

I admit that GKPS was not sustainable on these grounds, but that does not
show that GPSG could not have been modified in a way as to deal with Swiss
people and violins. I still reject the conclusion on this basis.

> But how should they be restricted? You can't just rule out
> good sentences in the interest of keeping your formalism
> lean. AS for the bag you mention, in spite of having omce

I was referring to the restriction already included by Peters/Uszkoreit. As
I said above, we would need a new story about violin-clauses in GPSG.

> presented a WCCFL paper called "PSG without metarules, I no
> longer see much difference between metarules and lexical
> rules. And there are ways of doing the other things you
> mention (inheritance hierarchies, features and types, list
> and set values) that make them not seem so louche. Which
> would you give up?

1) list values (no SUBCAT, COMPS or ARG-ST)
2) set values
3) relations
4) non-local side computations such as a-command (if not falling under 3.
anyway)

As I mentioned in an earlier reply to Emily, I am lazy and thus prefer
strong hypotheses. On the other hand, if somebody comes up and conclusively
shows that grammar theory cannot dispense with 1)-4), I'd be the first to
surrender.

Personally, I like some of the methodology of MP, in particular, calling
into question the apparatus. I think that GPSG was successful as a
competitor to GB because it was lean and because it was very careful in
introducing additional features, additional feature types and the like. It
is obviously clear that we can't just undo everything after 1985, but I
think it would be worthwhile, particularly when confronted with MP, to
re-read GKPS and to reconsider GPSG.

Best

T.