Detmar Meurers (dm@sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de)
Mon, 11 May 1998 15:14:18 +0200 (MET DST)
Hi Dinel, >Please forgive my ignorance, but I like to know if there is any difference >between HPSG formalism and HPSG theory. the terms are used in a variety of senses. But in general one should probably distinguish at least the following three things: 1. The 'logical formalism' underlying HPSG, e.g. King logic. This is the formal syntax and semantics of a language used to describe linguistic objects and express which are grammatical. A linguistic HPSG theory in the formal sense is a set of expressions of this formal language. The idea is that out of the ontologically possible linguistic objects determined by the signature only those are grammatical which are described by every expression in the theory. 2. A concrete linguistic proposal, e.g. the ideas expressed in a specific publication. As already mentioned above, such a proposal is properly specified by formulating a theory in the sense of providing the relevant set of formal language expressions. 3. The general linguistic beliefs and theory parts which are typical for many HPSG proposals. Compared to the first two notions (logical formalism and theory), this is a rather intuitive notion which could perhaps be called the 'HPSG framework'. For example, many HPSG linguists prefer to lexicalize linguistic properties instead of structurally encoding them, adopt something like the head feature principle to pass along head values, ... Note that these general beliefs which materialize in many of the proposals of linguists working in the HSPG framework are not directly dependent or deducible from the use of HPSG's logical formalism mentioned in 1. Philosophical issues aside, one could also encode at least certain GB or LFG proposals in HPSG's logical formalism. Sommergru3, Detmar ---------------------- Detmar Meurers Universit"at T"ubingen Seminar f"ur Sprachwissenschaft Abt. Computerlinguistik Kleine Wilhelmstr. 113 D-72074 T"ubingen Tel. +49-(0)7071-2978489 http://www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~dm/ ----------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Fri Dec 18 1998 - 20:38:19 PST