syncretism w/o paradigms

[Heidi Harley]

Hey dan!

You wrote:

 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'.

In fact, the phrase/word 'competition' that these kind of periphrastic
paradigmatic effects show is in fact one of the strongest arguments, in
my mind, in favor of a postsyntactic morphology, and against the
independent existence of 'paradigms' (independent of the set of
terminal nodes made available by the syntax, that is). The phrase/word
distinction has no pretheoretical status in such a theory, and so we
expect to see such effects everywhere, as in fact we do. Indeed, the
Impoverishment story can certainly predict syncretic effects that hold
simultaneously across word-sized and phrase-sized realizations of given
feature sets/terminal nodes.

But this kind of effect doesn't have any bearing on whether
Impoverishment is the right way to capture *all* metasyncretism
effects, I don't think... ?

Did someone at the paradigms workshop before the LSA talk about this
kind of metasyncretism problem?

:) hh