HPSG vs PP/MP: empirical differences

[Stephen M. Wechsler]

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.  It's a very
surprising result. The parts of the machine are very similar in the
two frameworks, but crucial differences arise when the parts are
assembled.
	The problem for MIT theories arises from the propensity for
modeling different types of abstract relation (argument structure,
grammatical relations, etc.) within a single phrase structure
representation-- a model from the 'Old Stone Age', as Bob Levine put
it.
	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.

--Steve
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