On containment and syncretism in English preterites and participles

Luke Adamson

doi:10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4555

Abstract

This study explores Bobaljik’s (2012) suggestion that in English, the feature representation of the preterite contains the representation of the past participle. While containment analyses in both Distributed Morphology (DM) and Nanosyntax capture the virtual absence of ABA patterns of syncretism for the order BASE-PARTICIPLE-PRETERITE, I demonstrate that they face empirical challenges when the exponence of the suffixes is considered. After evaluating an alternative feature decomposition, I show how a DM containment approach can derive the facts for both base and suffix alternations with the aid of impoverishment, which also helps to explain counterexamples to *ABA in this domain. Lastly, I offer cautionary discussion about the relationship between containment structures and deriving *ABA.

Highlights

Recent work on morphology has investigated the absence of so-called ABA patterns of syncretism for various feature classes, including case, number, adjectival grade, and clusivity (Caha 2009, 2017; Bobaljik 2012; McFadden 2018; Smith et al 2018; Moskal 2018, among others)
While I have discussed alter-nations in the base as contextual allomorphy, there is an ongoing debate in the literature about whether these alternations should be modeled in terms of morphophonological (MP) rules
As an illustration of this, if we were to assume that the MP rules are triggered by suffix exponents, we need not expect any implicational relationships to hold between the forms of participles and preterites when they use different suffix exponents

Summary

Introduction

Recent work on morphology has investigated the absence of so-called ABA patterns of syncretism for various feature classes, including case, number, adjectival grade, and clusivity (Caha 2009, 2017; Bobaljik 2012; McFadden 2018; Smith et al 2018; Moskal 2018, among others). Nanosyntactic accounts face challenges from both alternations in the base and the suffix allomorphy.5 Explaining these problems away would involve analyzing the combination of the base and -en as monomorphemic, with separate entries for the bare form, participle, and preterite. As noted by Caha (2017), an overlapping decomposition could technically yield ABA in a DM approach if the element that shares one feature in common with the others (in this case, the participle) is one allomorph, with the other realization being default (18) To rule this out, we could stipulate that the Vocabulary is constrained by a principle like (19), stated informally here. I return to the containment analysis, which, with one added impoverishment rule, derives both the alternations in the base and in the suffixes, but goes further in accounting for counterexamples to *ABA in a constrained way

Towards an analysis

DISCUSSION

Conclusion