HPSG vs PP/MP: empirical differences

Stephen M. Wechsler wechsler at mail.utexas.edu
Mon Apr 30 23:34:54 UTC 2001


At 3:02 PM -0400 4/30/01, Carl Pollard wrote:
>Hi Steve,
>
>>
>Regarding the comparison of HPSG with GB/P&P/MP, I'd like to plug my paper:
>
>WECHSLER, STEPHEN. 1999. HPSG, GB, and the Balinese Bind. In Lexical
>And Constructional Aspects of Linguistic Explanation, ed. by A.
>Kathol, J.-P. Koenig and G.Webelhuth. Stanford: CSLI.
>
>It's a case study in 'the myth of the notational variant.'  I compare
>HPSG and GB analyses of binding in a Western Austronesian language
>(Balinese), that are, in some intuitive sense 'the same', under
>correspondences of the following sort:
>
>HPSG:					GB:
>ARG-ST list items    			theta positions (under VP)
>relative obliqueness			relative c-command
>VALENCE list items			spec's of functional projections
>ARG-ST/VALENCE structure-sharing	chains
>
>The two analyses make the same predictions for simple Balinese
>examples.  But they diverge radically when the data become more
>complex:  the HPSG analysis correctly applies without any alteration,
>while the GB analysis turns out to be deeply flawed.   It's not a
>minor problem, fixable by tinkering with the definition of c-command
>or something.  In fact it seems that a GB analysis of W. Austronesian
>binding is impossible under normal assumptions.
>>>
>
>I pretty much followed you up to the penultimate sentence (though your
>correspondences differ somewhat from the way I usually explain in
>intro. courses how GB concepts map onto HPSG ones), but the last one
>came as a big surprise. Seldom, if ever, have I heard it assserted
>that framework X cannot analyze phenomenon Z; usually one hears:
>framework X cannot analyze phenomenon Z as simply and elgantly as
>framework, or that analysis of phenomenon Z in framework X necessarily
>makes recourse to ancillary devices that lack independent motivation.
>Betcha you get challenged on this!

Note the qualifier '...under normal assumptions'.  Yes, I've already
been challenged on it.  Responding to a conference presentation of
this work, GBers floated ideas like a special switch that converts
A-bar positions into A positions; dual subject positions, one A and
one A-bar (both mysteriously confering identical 'subject
properties', and with no particular evidence for it); and so on.

Maybe I should have said:  It is difficult or impossible to translate
my HPSG analysis into GB/PP/MP-- even though the component parts seem
to correspond  across the two frameworks.  That was my main point.

>	To my knowledge the only GB syntactician to take up my
>challenge is Lisa Travis, who proposed a radical overhaul of GB theta
>theory and binding theory to allow for these languages.
>>>
>
>That's fine -- there are as many HPSG binding theories as there are
>binding theorists who have worked in the framework. In your opinion,
>is the radical overhaul now serious competition for your analysis?

Travis did exactly the right thing by taking the issue seriously.
Her proposal: make binding depend on theta-positions, not A-positions
(fine so far); and then allow certain positions to 'count' as
theta-positions, even though they are landing sites for movement from
other theta positions.

Is it serious competition for my analysis?  That is, as Chomsky would
say, an empirical question.  One thing is clear: it is totally
different from my analysis.  (So the 2 alternatives should have
different empirical consequences, which I have not worked out.)  This
is all I need in order to illustrate my main point, namely that
apparently 'equivalent' or 'parallel' analyses in the 2 frameworks
can turn out to have radically different consequences.

Steve



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