Hpsg: Background and Basics 1 Phrases and Schemata

1. Introductory Remarks 1 We want to emphasize the extent to which HPSG is intellectually indebted to a wide range of recent research traditions in syntax (principally nonderivational approaches such as categorial grammar (CG), generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG), arc pair grammar (APG), and lexical-functional grammar (LFG)), semantics (especially situation semantics), and computer science (data type theory, knowledge representation, uniication-based formalisms). The phenomena with which P&S-94 are concerned with are among those which have occupied center stage within syntactic theory for well over thirty years: the control ofùnder-stood' subjects, long-distance dependencies conventionally treated in terms of wh-movement, and syntactic constraints on the relationship between various kinds of pronouns and their antecedents. Within that time period, detailed accounts of these phenomena { and of the relationships among them { have been developed within the research framework established by Noam Chomsky and known in its successive stages as thèstandard' theory, thèextended standard' theory, thèrevised extended standard' theory and`government-binding' theory (GB, or thèprinciples-and-parameters' approach). But given the widespread acceptance of that framework as a standard in recent years, especially among an extensive community of syntacticians in the United States and much of continental western Europe, it is incumbent upon the proponents of a competing framework to explicate the sense and extent to which the proposed alternative ddresses the concerns of that community. For that reason, we will try to make clear in what respects our accounts resemble those provided within GB theory, and { more importantly { in what respects they diier. A number of similarities between GB theory and the theory advocated here will be apparent. For example, in both theories structure is determined chieey by the interaction between highly articulated lexical entries and parametrized universal principles of grammatical well-formedness, with rules reduced to a handful of highly general and universally available phrase structure (or immediate dominance) schemata. A number of key GB principles (such as principles A, B, and C of the binding theory, subjacency, and the empty category principle) have more or less direct analogs in HPSG; and two other HPSG principles (the head feature principle and the subcategorization principle) play a role in the theory roughly comparable to that of the projection principle in GB. Moreover, in both GB and 1 There may be minor inconsistencies in this document, because it was cobbled together from other things in a hasty fashion. Sections 1 and 2 are adapted from C. …