Bronwyn Bjorkman will present a research s eminar 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 s
yncretism seems to be able to "rescue" syntactically illicit structures\, w
hen the syncretic form collapses a distinction between features that have d
ifferent morphological realizations elsewhere in the language. Morphologica
l neutrality has been argued to resolve feature conflicts in several langua
ges\, including Hungarian (Szamosi 1976)\, Norwegian (Taraldsen 1981)\, Ger
man (Groos and van Riemsdijk 1981)\, French (Kayne 1975\; Zaenen and Karttu
nen 1984)\, Finnish (Zaenen and Karttunen 1984)\, Russian (Asarina 2011)\,
and Polish (Citko 2018).
The existence of resolution via syncretism ra
ises 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 sync
retism to ever resolve feature conflicts\, structures with mismatching feat
ures on a single head must be syntactically licit—yet if they are syntactic
ally licit\, a theory like DM predicts that they should always have some gr
ammatical morphological realization\, if only by an elsewhere or default fo
rm\, in which case syncretism would be irrelevant. Second\, the usual way o
f describing resolution via syncretism casts it as a "repair"\, and one tha
t potentially exists alongside alternative resolution strategies\; I argue
that we should avoid language-specific "repair" mechanisms to the extent po
ssible\, and argue that there is no compelling reason to view resolution vi
a syncretism in these terms.