[HPSG-L] Formalism/theory distinction: citations

[Rui Chaves]

Dear Olga,
I think Givón made that distinction in

Givón, Talmy. 1979. On Understanding Grammar. New York, NY: Academic Press.

But I don't have the book with me, and can't tell you the page or the
passage in question.. maybe others know more about it.
Best,
R


On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 3:51 PM Olga Zamaraeva <olzama at uw.edu> 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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--
Rui P. Chaves (he/him)
Associate Professor of Linguistics, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Director of Graduate Studies for the Computational Linguistics Program
https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~rchaves/