[HPSG-L] Formalism/theory distinction: citations

[Berthold Crysmann]

Hi Olga,

On 05/01/2021 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.

What is special, though, that we opted for a single formalism to
implement different theories, unlike the LFG approach where linguistic
sub-theories can be couched in different formalism, and they often are.
Think of CFGs for constituency plus FS for functional structure plus
linear logic for semantics plus either PFM (formalism plus theory) or
FST for morphology. There may be more but these are the ones that come
to mind.

Cheers,

Berthold

>
> 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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-- 
Berthold Crysmann <crysmann at linguist.univ-paris-diderot.fr>
CNRS, Laboratoire de linguistique formelle
5 rue Thomas Mann, Case 7031
F-75205 Paris cedex 13