SC has written previously about the goings on of the HPSG-L mailing list, and wishes to do so again today. The list is often quiescent for weeks, even months, at a time, but occasionally explodes with activity, which is generally more than a little self-conscious about the Rodney Dangerfield-ness of syntactic theories not named Minimalism (or GB, Principles and Parameters, etc.).
Two discussions of note have been going on lately. One is the always enjoyable, if not productive, argument about which theory is more formally rigorous, and to what extent various syntactic frameworks are guilty of sloppiness on arcane points. This thread and this one contain some delightful polemics (note: SC does not know any of the participants personally, only through articles they've written or contributions to the list).
There's another discussion which is a lot more valuable regardless of one's specialization within linguistics, on the question of "how many conferences is too many?". Motivated by the recent decrease in submissions to the annual HPSG conference, people with clout are asking the question: "does it make sense to organize conferences around theoretical paradigms, or around research subjects?". There are already a fairly large number of conferences that take abstracts across the board research-wise: LSA, WCCFL, NELS, the Chicago and Berkeley Linguistics Society meetings. But then there are also plenty more conferences devoted to single research frameworks: within the context of the HPSG list alone, suggestions have been made to merge the HPSG conference with that of the LFG community, or the Formal Grammar community, or even the Construction Grammar community, which shares fewer of the background assumptions of HPSG than the first two. Clearly, though, these conferences segment the community of syntactitians into some pretty narrowly-focused groups, even when they might have overlapping interest in the same phenomenon.
Not being in academia, SC has no particularly good suggestions about how to resolve the problem. It's hard for even professional academics to keep up with the proliferation of proceedings, not to mention the travel budgets required to attend all of these events, though, and so questioning the motivation for maintaining them all is healthy. Of course, many of these conferences wouldn't have evolved if there wasn't a sense that researchers outside of the dominant paradigms didn't have a hard time getting a hearing at mainstream events. So it's not as though there are no reasons to maintain separate conferences, but it's healthy for the field to have debates like this.
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