[HPSG-L] Formalism/theory distinction: citations

[Olga Zamaraeva]

Thanks very much, everyone!

I just wanted to share that Antonio M. y Premier notes off-list that
Chomsky has a footnote in *Syntactic Structures*, p. 54:

"Linguistic
> theory will thus be formulated in a metalanguage to the language in
> which grammars are written - a metametalanguage to any language for
> which a grammar is constructed."


On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 3:24 PM Rui Chaves <rchaves at buffalo.edu> wrote:

> 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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> > HPSG-L at listserv.linguistlist.org
> > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/hpsg-l
>
>
>
> --
> 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/
>


-- 
Olga Zamaraeva