syncretism w/o paradigms

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi Heidi,

>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.

I think it's reasonable to assume that both exist.  It seems to me
that the learner would need different types of evidence to postulate
Impoverishment than to postulate syncretism based on underspecified
Vocab items.  For Impoverishment, they'd need cross-"paradigmatic"
evidence -- evidence that goes beyond one set of competing Vocab
items.  It's sometimes possible to show that a feature that isn't
morphologically realized in one position hasn't been Impoverished,
because it triggers agreement in another position.  On the other
hand, metasyncretism effects sound like a good case for
Impoverishment.  The prediction would be that contrasts neutralized
metasyncretically would NOT trigger agreement elsewhere... can't
recall if JDB discusses that in his paper or not.

If a systematic contrast is totally absent from a language, then the
learner can postulate a corresponding impoverishment
(underspecification) of the morphosyntactic feature geometry -- or
perhaps even an elimination of the feature from the Lexicon, though
I'm still struggling with what this would mean at the semantic
interface.  Actually, I've probably said this backwards.  Presumably
kids need positive evidence to *activate* morphosyntactic features,
not negative evidence to *neutralize* them.

Cheers,
Martha
--
mcginnis at ucalgary.ca