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Proceedings of the 1st Generative Linguistics in Poland meeting, pp. 1-4.
Foreword
This volume contains a collection of papers presented at the first Generative Linguistics in Poland conference, Warsaw, 13–14 November 1999. This conference was organised as a joint effort by Piotr Bański (University of Warsaw) and Adam Przepiórkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences), as the first in a new series of linguistic meetings.
Below, we briefly describe the origins, the theme, the aims, and also the future of this enterprise.
The Roots
The idea of that workshop had two primary sources. The first was a feeling of isolation — doing generative linguistics in Poland is still a hermit activity, in many respects. There is so little communication between Polish generative syntacticians that we learn of one another's achievements or even existence mostly from references made by foreign authors. We seem to work on isolated islands, and what is even more peculiar, the limits of our islands are not purely geographic in nature. While it is true that there is a sea between Warszawa and, for example, Poznań or Kraków, there is also a sea — if not an ocean — between the Institute of English Studies of the University of Warsaw (where Piotr Bański works) and the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences (where Adam Przepiórkowski works), also in Warsaw, although the scope of our work often overlaps. There is another ocean between the Institute of English Studies and the Institute of Polish (where prof. Marek Świdziński has his linguistic seminar), and that is within the same University.
The second factor was our conversations with Jacek Witkoś in early May 1999, who suggested that some time in the future it would be good to have an informal meeting of Polish syntacticians in Warsaw, because of its central location, so that everyone could come to Warsaw in the morning, participate in the meeting, and leave in the evening, without having to pay for accomodation. While for various reasons this did not seem to be a tenable option, the spirit of Jacek's suggestion certainly played a major role in our decision to try to organise such a meeting.
The Theme
The title of the workshop and of these proceedings contains the phrase generative linguistics. What is generative linguistics? As noted in the lucid discussion of this question in Borsley's contribution to this volume, there seem to be two related but distinct meanings of the term generative grammar as used in contemporary linguistics.
One meaning is that given by dictionaries of linguistic terms (emphasis ours):
generative grammar n. 1. A grammar for a particular language which at least enumerates and usually also characterizes (assigns structures to) all and only the well-formed sentences of that language… Such a grammar differs from other approaches to grammatical description in that it is fully explicit, leaving nothing to be filled in by a human reader. The notion of a generative grammar in this sense was introduced by Chomsky (1957)… 2. Any particular theory of grammar which has as its goal the construction of such grammars for particular languages. 3. The enterprise of constructing such theories of grammar…
(Trask, 1993)
[A] generative grammar is a set of formal rules which projects a finite set of sentences upon the potentially infinite set of sentences that constitute the language as a whole, and it does this in an {explicit manner, assigning to each a set of structural descriptions… In recent years, the term has come to be applied to theories of several different kinds, apart from those developed by Chomsky, such as Arc-Pair Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar and Generalized Phrase-Structure Grammar…
(Crystal, 1997)
According to these definitions, the defining feature of generative grammar is explicitness: generative grammars should explicitly predict which expressions belong to a language and which do not. This is the definition given by most linguists, including Noam Chomsky, the father of contemporary linguistics:
If the grammar is… perfectly explicit… we may… call it a generative grammar.
(Chomsky, 1965)
What is generative grammar? It is supposed to be an explicit statement of what the cases of linguistic expressions in a language are and what kind of structures they have.
(Bach, 1989)
I have always understood a generative grammar to be nothing more than an explicit grammar.
(Chomsky, 1995)
Generative grammar is the attempt to develop precise and explicit accounts of mental grammars and to specify what is and is not possible in such grammars.
(Borsley, 2000)
There is, however, also a different sense of the phrase generative grammar or generative syntax, a sense which is implicit in the quotes below:
For alternatives to generative grammar, see inter alia Borsley, 1996; Pollard & Sag, 1994; Steedman, 1993; Bresnan, 1994; Hudson, 1990.
(Smith, 1999)
[S]yntactic theory, from its start in 1957, with the publication of Chomsky's Syntactic Structures… through the Government and Binding (GB) period… and into the current climate of Minimalism, has been at the center of modern linguistics…. This is why many other formal linguistic systems define themselves in relation to generative syntax.
(Bailyn, 2000)
In this more narrow sense, the term generative grammar is constrained to theories advocated by Chomsky and excludes other explicit and formal linguistic theories.
It was the first of the above meanings that we had in mind when organising the workshop and preparing this volume. Accordingly, linguistic analyses in these proceedings are formulated not only within Chomsky's Principles and Parameters (GB / Minimalism; Chomsky 1981,1986,1985) framework, but also within Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG; Bresnan 1982,2000) and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG; Pollard & Sag 1984, Borsley 1996).
The Aims
The first Generative Linguistics in Poland (GLiP) conference was a syntactic meeting, whose aim was to bring together (i) Polish generative syntacticians, (ii) generative syntacticians working in Poland, as well as (iii) generative syntacticians working on Polish (these three groups are obviously not co-extensive).
This integration is needed for a number of reasons. First, as we already mentioned above, there is the need to increase cooperation between different academic centres in Poland (universities and the Polish Academy of Sciences). Second, there is a barrier between different philological backgrounds which hampers communication between syntacticians working in, say, English departments, Polish departments and German departments. Third, there is a chasm between different grammatical models; it is our hope that the Generative Linguistics in Poland meetings will initiate more regular cooperation between adherents of different schools of generative syntax, such as Principles and Parameters, HPSG, LFG and Optimality Theory. From what we can observe in the way representatives of some of those schools interact, this can be quite a hard task, but because of that it is even more pressing. The intention of bridging such gaps is expressed by the very fact that this workshop is organised by linguists working within two different formalisms, i.e., within Principles and Parameters and within HPSG.
The fact that we called this conference the first Generative Linguistics in Poland meeting reflects our hope that we will be able to organise such gatherings on a regular basis; the next GLiP meeting is scheduled for early December 2000.
We wish to thank both the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Institute of English Studies of the University of Warsaw for their financial support, without which it would not be possible for us to organise the first GLiP meeting and publish the proceedings volume. We are also grateful to Agnieszka Mykowiecka for her help in the process of the preparation of this volume.
© Piotr Bański and Adam Przepiórkowski
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