[HPSG-L] Formalism/theory distinction: citations

[Valia Kordoni]

Dear Gerald,

touché! So fantastically said!

So nice to hear from you again!

Take care!
Valia

On Tue, January 5, 2021 22:14, Gerald Penn wrote:
> Dear Olga Zamaraeva,
>
>   It's probably a mistake to be looking for a genesis of this distinction
> within
> HPSG, because HPSG itself developed within a context of multiple
> interacting
> theories that partly shared their formalisms, and this distinction was
> already
> known within that context.
>   The oldest discussion that I am aware of was in Mark Johnson's
> dissertation in
> the late 1980s, but it may very well go back earlier than that.  The
> justification
> at the time was a very pragmatic one:  separating formalism from theory
> allowed
> us the freedom to choose a very standard formalism from logic and computer
> science
> in which the proof theory and search algorithms were already well
> understood.
>
> Regards,
> Gerald
>
> On Tue, January 5, 2021 3:49 pm, Olga Zamaraeva wrote:
>> Dear colleagues,
>>
>> In a number of papers, it is pointed out that there is an important
>> clear
>> distinction between formalism and theory in HPSG: the formalism can be
>> used
>> to encode a number of theories (e.g. with linearization and without,
>> etc.).
>> See e.g. Bender 2008
>> <https://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/TLS/TLS10-2006/TLS10_Bender.pdf>
>> or Bender and Emerson 2020
>> <https://hpsg.hu-berlin.de/Projects/HPSG-handbook/PDFs/cl.pdf>, or
>> Daniels
>> and Meurers 2004 <https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C04-1025.pdf>.
>> This distinction becomes crucial in implementations so it tends to come
>> up
>> in computational linguistics literature, though the principle seems to
>> be
>> a
>> philosophical one.
>>
>> I would like to know (i) who was the first to describe this distinction
>> in
>> these terms; and (ii) where does the philosophical principle originate.
>> As
>> for (i), it appears it may have been Bender 2008 but it also seems like
>> it
>> could be much earlier than that. Everything earlier than that that I
>> found
>> does not talk about the distinction directly but rather seems to assume
>> it
>> as a fact. As for Pollard and Sag, they do say that they "eschew extreme
>> formalization" in order to be able to talk about the theory but I am not
>> sure I could infer the distinction from that?
>>
>> I'd be grateful for any thoughts or references!
>>
>> Yours,
>> --
>> Olga Zamaraeva
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>
>
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