syncretism w/o paradigms

[Heidi Harley]

... and for a second take, here's something I've been worrying about:

I've just been rereading Bobaljik's 2000 reply to Williams' 1994
'remarks on lexical knowledge' article in which Williams argues that
metaparadigmattic patterns of syncretism are a robust phenomenon whose
existence a theory should predict.

Bobaljik does a very convincing job of showing that an 'instatiated
basic paradigm' isn't a requirement of UG, and hence that the
metaparadigmatic effects are not traceable to any actual metaparadigm
requirement. He argues that Impoverishment rules can do the same job
that the metaparadigmatic points of entry that Williams proposes, which
is certainly true, since they have their effect before Vocab Insertion
and so should create the same syncretic patterns in all relevant
paradigms, even ones whose VIs are not related to each other.

While it's true that Impoverishment *can* do the job of creating
metasyncretism in the right way, it's actually not really too great to
have to do *all* syncretism that way. Impoverishment would be (un)doing
exactly the same job that paradigm structure is supposed to be doing in
lexicalist approaches. Worse, it would just mean that competiton
between vocab items would almost never arise. Part of the
attractiveness of the late insertion account is that the garden-variety
syncretic effects we see in language can be taken care of via the
subset principle, i.e. by regular competition of VIs for fully
specified syntactic nodes, no additional operations necessary. But just
VI competition by itself doesn't predict the metasyncretism effect at
all, as bobaljik notes. In fact, it seems to me that it predicts that
such effects should be rare to nonexistent, which they're definitely
not.

Given the robustness of the metasyncretic effect, it seems to me we want
another account of why variation in syncretism across paradigms within
a given language is so rare. The feature-geometric approach, like
noyer's feature-hierarchy approach, does constrain possible syncretic
patterns somewhat. But neither approach predicts why in two otherwise
vocab-item-unrelated paradigms in a given language (e.g. the masculine
nominal and adjectival declensions of Russian), the same set of
contrasts are neutralized again and again. As long as the geometry or
hierarchy is respected, the separate vocab items could easily realize
one set of contrasts in one paradigm and another set in another.

Given that languages DON'T require a metaparadigm (as Bobaljik shows),
does anyone out there have any speculations about why metaparadigmatic
effects show up so strongly? Are they historical accidents?
Learnability effects? Do we want lang-specific 'entry points' marked on
the feature geomtry, sort of like Williams suggests? or is
Impoverishment the way that all syncretism is implemented, and we can
just throw the subset/elsewhere principle out the window? or what?

:) hh



Heidi Harley
Department of Linguistics
University of Arizona
(520)626-3554
http://linguistics.arizona.edu/~hharley/