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From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Syntactical *definition* of English
Message-ID: <2521@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 23 Oct 88 10:26:13 GMT
References: <8330@bcsaic.UUCP>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 29

From article <8330@bcsaic.UUCP>, by rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik):
" Greg, I would be interested in knowing the criteria by which you judge one
" 'current theory' of syntax to be better than the others.  Why is GPSG
" better than HPSG, in your opinion?  Than LFG?  (Don't bother with GB.  I
" don't want to stir up trouble.  :-)

Actually, it's only context free phrase structure grammar I'm prepared
to defend, not GPSG specifically.  The nice thing about GPSG is that
a GPSG description abbreviates a finite number of CF phrase structure
rules, and so describes a context free language.  If and to the extent
the other theories you mentioned allow a similar interpretation, I
love them, too.  But I don't know whether they do.

I should admit that I find much of the current literature in syntax
difficult to understand, since though it purports to be about syntactic
theory, it seems really only to concern conciseness or convenience of
description.  This includes GPSG, the book, by Gazdar, Klein, Pullum,
and Sag.

To what I said in reply to Walter Rolandi, I'd like to add something
about the local nature of lexical subcategorization, again, following
Gazdar.  Subcategorization of items with respect to sister constituents
is straightforward in a context free phrase structure grammar, and
this is the only, or at least the predominate, kind of subcategorization
found in natural language.  However, I'm not sure it's possible to
make this out as a prediction of CFPSG without an appeal to simplicity,
since one can also describe certain non-local subcategorizations.

		Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu