the right track vs. the wrong track

[Stephen M. Wechsler]

local/global economy... formal rigor... acquisition... innateness...
monotonicity... psychological plausibility...  ...

All important considerations.  But my own reason for choosing
HPSG/LFG type theories over GB/PP in the first place (after being
trained in GB, I literally moved from east to west, Cornell ->
Stanford), and for sticking with that decision, has nothing to do
with the above issues.  Rather, it just seems to me that the
lexicalist (HPSG/LFG) theories are, at the very least, on the right
track about the way natural language syntax works, while P&P is on
the wrong track.

Some examples:

1. Non-configurational case-marking languages show that grammatical
functions are not always encoded by configuration, pace GB.  (I know
it is much more complicated, but I have not found the P&P responses
on this issue convincing.)

2. In HPSG we can actually deduce, from the basic mechanism of
valence list cancellation, that only subjects can raise (in SSR and
SOR).  This very welcome result is rarely noted.  By contrast, for
two decades GB/P&P researchers have spilled gallons of ink on a
succession of different attempts to formulate extrinsic constraints
to 'explain' why only subjects raise:  first Case theory, then
various constraints to the effect that you can't hop over a subject
position, and so on.
	Similarly, raising is local, structure-preserving, etc., all
strongly suggesting a lexical rather than movement analysis.

3. For two decades Bresnan and colleagues have presented careful
arguments that passive and other morpholexical relation changing
alternations are lexical, not syntactic-- crucially including the
designation of the subject argument, the part that must occur in the
syntax under P&P.  (One angle is to show that passive feeds
derivational morphology processes.)  I find these arguments
compelling, and never effectively answered.

4. As I noted in an earlier email, 'mixed pivot' or 'syntactically
ergative' langauges, including perhaps hundreds of Western
Austronesian languages, are a disaster for the A-movement theory, but
fit in with our approach.

Probably many of you could add to this list.

I know this is old news, but it is what matters for me.  I wonder if
there are others out there like me--?

Steve