Valia Kordoni, Frank Richter: A Comparison of LFG and HPSG

Kaplan and Bresnan's LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar) and Pollard and Sag's HPSG (Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar) are widely perceived as closely related paradigms, but both have changed much since their inception, and there is significant evidence that they may now differ more than they agree. The course will discuss both paradigms from ontological presuppositions through formal mechanisms to linguistic analyses, and emphasise their similarities, their differences, and the consequences for pursuing various linguistic aims. The aim of the course is to give timely and objective information about the comparative strengths and weaknesses of LFG and HPSG in various areas of linguistic research, and thereby indicate which (if either) would best tackle a given linguistic problem.

The HPSG section of the course will be mainly based on the reading material that we list below. If you wish to prepare for the course, you can download the material from here. For the LFG section of the course, we recommend to read the LFG literature given on the introductory slides (the papers by Dalrymple (et al.) and Kaplan et al.). Many of these papers can be found in the LFG archive and in the LFG bibliography. You can also pick up the bibliography by anonymous ftp from ftp-lfg.stanford.edu in the directory /pub/lfg/bibliography/. References to URLs where the papers can be downloaded are also contained in our more comprehensive bibliography.

Overview and Bibliography

Paul John King: Towards Truth in HPSG

Three Interpretations of the Meaning of HPSG 94 Grammars

The Formal Language of HPSG 94

Defining a Classical Semantic Representation Language (Ty2) in RSRL

The following handouts are from our corresponding course at ESSLLI 2000 in Birmingham:

5th Handout ( 4up/ .ps)

6th Handout ( 4up / .ps)

7th Handout ( 4up / .ps)

Comparison

Frank Richter

Last modified: Sat Apr 19 14:39:25 CEST 2008