report from Barcelona (first week)

[bresnan at csli.stanford.edu]

Hi, just thought I'd report on the first week of the Barcelona ESSLI
and Conference on Formal Grammar.  Others who were there are welcome
to add from their own perspective.  I'll focus on the lfg-related stuff.

The ESSLI has a strong audience of logicians and formal linguists from
Europe.  It has a very pleasant combination of intellectual rigor and
discipline combined with a socially egalitarian, informal atmosphere.
The lectures began daily at 8:30 a.m. and continued in sessions until 8:00
p.m., when the weather cooled substantially, and everyone went out for
long, leisurely suppers of Catalan specialities such as tomato bread,
salads and seafood, often accompanied by very tasty red wine--rioja.

This year there was "a feast of LFG", in Ruth Kempson's words.  The
2-day conference on Formal Grammar on May 12-13 began with an
excellent talk by Fernando Pereira on linear logic as means of
semantic assembly for LFG f-structures.  The linear logic approach
seems to be the coming wave--expect to see a lot more on this.  There
are also very nice parallels between linear logics and categorial
logics.  Categorial linguists--Dick Oehrle for one--showed interested
in combining categorial semantics with the lfg syntactic architecture.
The linear logic semantics theme was picked up on again in several
lectures by Mary Dalrymple during the Kaplan-Dalrymple course, Topics
in LFG.  

Other lfg talks at the Formal Grammar conference included Alex Alsina
on Catalan reflexives and inversions (arguing against a one-to-one
correspondence between a-structure roles and f-structure functions)
and Miriam Butt on Urdu causatives (arguing for using aspectual
structure in the a-s to f-s correspondence).  I missed the week-two
workshop on argument structure and linking organized by Louisa Sadler
and Annie Zaenen.

The Kaplan-Dalrymple course reviewed the formal architecture of lfg,
including some more recent developments, and surveyed some new mathematical
results.  It complemented my own course on Phrase Structure Typology
and LFG, which presented a synthesis of work that's been going on
at Stanford for the past 8-10 years by myself, Peter Sells, Paul
Kroeger, Tracy King, Peter Austin, and others.  I used the first 200
page chunk of my textbook-in-the-works as course reading material, and
tried to cover scrambling, head-movement, pronominal incorporation,
nonconfiguratioanlity and weak crossover variation in 5 days!
I was very pleasantly surprised by how much interest there was in this topic.
Perhaps formalists and logicians are hungry for some linguistic
meat on top of all the logic bones.

The lfg topic of a-structure projection/mapping theory also attracts a
lot of attention. Again, I'm sorry I missed the second week workshop
on this.  Maybe other participants can fill us in on what happened.

I met a number of students working on hpsg, lfg, and categorial
approaches to linguistics, and was very impressed by their openness
and ease of understanding.  They were a bit shy about raising
questions during the lecture, but the questions they did raise with me
afterwards were razor sharp, and have helped my thinking.  I learned a
lot from this teaching experience.

Well, this is a very partial report, but maybe not inappropriate for
the lfg list.








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Joan Bresnan	bresnan at csli.stanford.edu      ______     _`\<,_    _`\<,_
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