syncretism w/o paradigms

[Daniel L. Everett]

Heidi,

You wrote:

> 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
>
>

First, one problem still with the Impoverishment idea, however this
could be my lack of understanding of the notion, is that in the phrasal
paradigm cells there is usually semantic drift, in the direction of
changing the meaning of the phrasal cells so that their meaning is (i)
not merely compositional and (ii) matching the expected meaning of that
cell of the paradigm, as though the paradigm itself were imposing
meaning. How does DM handle paradigm-influenced meaning, without
paradigms?

On the workshop, which I had a chance to present at but was unable to
do so because of my cheap airline tickets not allowing me to change
dates, I *think* that the overall thrust was largely on the
phonology-morphology facts.

The Word conference in Leipzig next month, judging by the abstracts and
titles, will deal with some of these issues too.

All the best.

-- Dan

------------------------------------------

Daniel L. Everett
Professor of Phonetics & Phonology
Postgraduate Programme Director
Department of Linguistics
The University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester, UK M13 9PL
http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de
Fax: 44-161-275-3187
Office: 44-161-275-3158