Frank Richter: 87, 94, 14? The Nature of Linguistic Theory
In the early days of HPSG, there was considerable emphasis on its
formal foundations and on the 'nature of linguistic theory' that would
go with a particular formalization. In fact, HPSG came with at least
two significantly different sets of foundational assumptions: A logic
of partial information in 1987, and a theory of linguistic types in
1994, soon to be followed by a number of modifications as the
mathematical details were spelled out and a few philosophical
disagreements over their interpretation were settled.
In the meantime, the way in which linguistic research is conducted has
changed: Controlled psycholinguistic experiments provide a much more
fine-grained picture of processing facts and the gradedness of human
acceptability judgments, statistical language modeling has become the
standard in computational linguistics, and large-scale corpora allow
insights into actual language use that were not available
before. Closer to home for HPSG, there is now a considerable number of
computational grammar implementations which show how HPSG fares
with respect to grammar fragments in different languages, and how these
grammars behave computationally.
In this talk, I would like to reconsider the nature of HPSG-style
grammar theory and its perspective on language in light of the
empirical turn in linguistics. Questions to be touched upon include
how suitable its foundational assumptions are for the description of
data gained with any of the empirical methods above, what these data
can or should tell us about linguistic theory, and which of them
should be considered subject to what kind of linguistic theory.
We know HPSG in 1987 and in 1994. My modest aim is to present
HPSG 2014.
