Abstract
Cross-linguistic generalizations about grammatical contexts favoring syncretism often have an implicational form. This paper shows that this is expected if (i) morphological paradigms are required to be both as small and as unambiguous as possible, (ii) languages may prioritize these requirements differently, and (iii) probability distributions for grammatical features interacting in syncretic patterns are fixed across languages. More specifically, this approach predicts that grammatical contexts that are less probable or more informative about a target grammatical feature $ T $ should favor syncretism of $ T $ cross-linguistically. The paper provides evidence for these predictions based on four detailed case studies involving well-known patterns of contextual syncretism (gender syncretism based on number, gender syncretism based on person, aspect syncretism based on tense, and case syncretism based on animacy).
Highlights
Across languages, morphology often fails to mark grammatically relevant distinctions in some contexts
Morphological distinctions are richer in contexts that are more frequent. This approach is represented by Greenberg (1966), who established markedness scales based on the frequency of grammatical features and used them to explain the typology of morphological syncretism
This diachronic scenario explains why aspect syncretism is favored in the present tense: the combination of perfective aspect and present tense is infrequent and learners should tend to assume that only the imperfective morph is available in this tense
Summary
Morphology often fails to mark grammatically relevant distinctions in some contexts. Language variation results from different ways of resolving the conflict between minimizing resource cost on the speaker’s part (which favors small morphological paradigms) and maximizing decoding accuracy on the listener’s part (which favors morphological paradigms that are as large as allowed by the free combination of available grammatical features) The interaction of these two conflicting goals takes place in a synchronic model of the speaker’s morphological productions using weighted constraints (Smolensky & Legendre 2006). The two combinations of feature values (genitive singular vs nominative plural) do not form a minimal pair: both case and number vary These patterns are often treated as involving accidental or arbitrary homophony (see Baerman et al 2005 on the distinction between accidental and systematic syncretism).
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