syncretism w/o paradigms

[Daniel L. Everett]

Heidi,

Hey. The arguments against the status of paradigms don't seem to pay
much attention to recent work on  'periphrastic paradigms', so far as I
am aware. So work by Ackerman, Stump, myself, and others on languages
in which paradigms can include phrases might be more supportive than
perhaps Jonathan knew (this work is all pretty new). In a recent ms
(Liminal Categories, on my website) - which I am currently splitting
into two papers - the first part deals with pronominal paradigms in
Wari that are 100% periphrastic, yet must be treated as paradigms.

If phrases can occupy cells of paradigms, then principles of paradigm
construction don't seem reduceable to morphological principles like
'impoverishment'.

Dan

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Daniel L. Everett
Professor of Phonetics & Phonology
Postgraduate Programme Director
Department of Linguistics
The University of Manchester
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http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de
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