Re: Mini-HPSG Conference?? About this list Date view Thread view Subject view Author view Fernando Pereira (pereira@research.att.com) Mon, 11 Sep 95 10:31 EDT * Next message: Bob Carpenter: "Re: Mini-HPSG Conference??" * Previous message: Dr. R.D.Borsley: "Re: response to Borsley" * In reply to: Bob Carpenter: "response to Borsley" * Next in thread: Bob Carpenter: "Re: Mini-HPSG Conference??" ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Bob Carpenter writes: > [...] > The only kind of evidence I trust in theoretical linguistics is the > form-meaning relation that gets generated. I don't see that we have > good hard evidence for anything else. This says nothing about phrase > structure at all. As we know from formal language theory, various > kinds of transformations can be applied to grammars in order to get > grammars that generate the same set of form/meaning pairs (usually > just stated as generating the same language in a formal language book, > but this amounts to the same thing). > [ lots of good arguments ] > The basic moral is that a non-local grammar can be transformed into a > local one using fairly standard techniques, and grammars with empty > categories can be transformed into ones without also by standard > techniques (pick up any book on formal languages and look at the > Chomsky-Normal-Form transform that shows how to eliminate empty > categories from any CFG to produce an equivalent one that also has > only binary branching). While I am sympathetic to your overall argument, there's an argument obligation in the above that you don't seem to have discharged: you have to show that non-local to local grammar transformations can be carried out preserving the form-meaning relation. Taking an instance from formal language theory, it is not the case that one can take an arbitrary attribute grammar and compute from it a CNF grammar that assigns the same attributes to the same strings (because empty and chain productions may be doing real computation). I suspect that reasonable form-meaning mappings will allow the grammar transformations you describe (cf. Marc Dymetman's dissertation on normal forms for logic grammars), but this technical question needs to be settled for the argument to go through. Another, more empirical, question, is that of incrementality: it is not a given than an arbitrary grammar describing a form-meaning relation has an equivalent form in which every input prefix is assigned a "closed" meaning. If we believe the psicholinguistic arguments for incrementality, there may be something here that requires suitable argumentation. -- Fernando Pereira 2B-441, AT&T Bell Laboratories 600 Mountain Ave, Murray Hill, NJ 07974-0636 pereira@research.att.com ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ * Next message: Bob Carpenter: "Re: Mini-HPSG Conference??" * Previous message: Dr. R.D.Borsley: "Re: response to Borsley" * In reply to: Bob Carpenter: "response to Borsley" * Next in thread: Bob Carpenter: "Re: Mini-HPSG Conference??" 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