Bronwyn Bjorkman will present a research seminar in the TFS seminar room.
The profile of syncretism in morphosyntactic ”repairs”
This talk explores the morphology-syntax interface, through an investigation of cases where morphological syncretism seems to be able to “rescue” syntactically illicit structures, when the syncretic form collapses a distinction between features that have different morphological realizations elsewhere in the language. Morphological neutrality has been argued to resolve feature conflicts in several languages, including Hungarian (Szamosi 1976), Norwegian (Taraldsen 1981), German (Groos and van Riemsdijk 1981), French (Kayne 1975; Zaenen and Karttunen 1984), Finnish (Zaenen and Karttunen 1984), Russian (Asarina 2011), and Polish (Citko 2018).
The existence of resolution via syncretism raises a number of architectural questions. First, it is nontrivial to model such resolution in many frameworks. This is especially true for lexicalist syntactic theories, but also true for derivational interpretive theories like Distributed Morphology (DM, Halle and Marantz 1993 et seq.). For syncretism to ever resolve feature conflicts, structures with mismatching features on a single head must be syntactically licit—yet if they are syntactically licit, a theory like DM predicts that they should always have some grammatical morphological realization, if only by an elsewhere or default form, in which case syncretism would be irrelevant. Second, the usual way of describing resolution via syncretism casts it as a “repair”, and one that potentially exists alongside alternative resolution strategies; I argue that we should avoid language-specific “repair” mechanisms to the extent possible, and argue that there is no compelling reason to view resolution via syncretism in these terms.
