[HPSG-L] Formalism/theory distinction: citations

[Roussanka Loukanova]

Hi Olga, Hi Everyone on the list!

On my side, I have some related ideas, on which I've been working for some
years. Gerald has expressed them very well. I see already a line of
interesting references.

Olga, it would be nice, at some point, if you could send us an accumulated
list.
Here are some references which precede the ones mentioned so far, in
support to Gerald's description, on the side of math.

Lambek, J.: The mathematics of sentence structure. Am. Math. Mon. 154–170
(1958)

Lambek, J.: On the calculus of syntactic types. In: Jakobson, R. (ed.)
Structure of Language and Its Mathematical Aspects. Proceedings of Symposia
in Applied Mathematics, vol. 12, pp. 166–178. American Mathematical
Society, Providence (1961). https://doi.org/10.1090/psapm/ 012

Bar-Hillel, Y., Gaifman, C., Shamir, E.: On categorial and phrase-structure
grammars. Bull. Res. Counc. Isr. F9, 1–16 (1960)

Best Regards,
Roussanka


On Tue, 5 Jan 2021 at 22:23, Berthold Crysmann <berthold.crysmann at gmail.com>
wrote:

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