differences between SBCG and ECxG

[Stefan Müller]

Hi Mariana,

My grammar theory text book contains chapters about HPSG and CxG. It
compares the formal CxG variants with HPSG.

http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/Pub/grammatiktheorie.html

The book is in German but those who understand HPSG may make some sense
of the feature descriptions. The gist is: Embodied CxG is very similar
to HPSG from a technical point of view. What they have in their boxes
are basically feature value pairs and path equations. The only thing
where it is not obvious how this can be done in HPSG is the evokes
operator, but this can also be modeled with a list valued feature. (see
page 248 of the GT book)

Embodied CxG differs from SB-CxG with regard to locality assumptions.
ECxG does not have a MOTHERS feature and hence is more similar to old
school HPSG. Richter and Sailer argued in 2009 that the locality
assumptions of SB-CxG are too strong to account for certain idioms and
hence the current state of the art seems to be something equivalent to
PS94. ECxG is very similar to PS94 + discontinuous constituents. There
are some differences regarding the feature geometry and semantics.

Apart from those things there are differences in the general spirit of
the analyses. ECxG is more in the traditional line of Construction
Grammar and assumes phrasal constructions for argument structure
constructions (for instance Bergen and Chang, 2005 assume a phrasal
ditransitive construction). SB-CxG and HPSG assumes lexical
constructions for these cases. I argued in several papers that the
lexical view is the right view if one wants to stick to certain key
assumptions that are usually made in non-transformational frameworks.
This issue is also discussed in the grammar theory text book, including
evidence from language acquisition, psycholinguistic experiments, and
arguments referring to corpus distribution and statistics.

Best wishes

        Stefan

-- 
Stefan Müller       Tel: (+49) (+30) 838 52973
                    Fax: (+49) (030) 838 4 52973
Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie
Deutsche Grammatik
Habelschwerdter Allee 45
14 195 Berlin

http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/

http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/Babel/Interaktiv/