syncretism w/o paradigms

[Martha McGinnis]

>cross-"paradigmatic" evidence -- evidence that goes beyond one set
>of competing Vocab items

Apologies... rereading this, I'm not sure it means anything within
DM, where there are no paradigms or possibly even "sets" per se.
What evidence the learner would need to postulate Impoverishment is
not obvious (to me, anyway).  In practice, *linguists* usually
postulate Impoverishment only if the syncretism (or metasyncretism)
in question can't be captured either by underspecified Vocab items or
by underspecified morphosyntactic feature geometries.  Maybe that's
sensible for learners too -- Impoverish only when necessary.  Not
sure exactly how this would work in practice.  Over to you, Heidi...

-Martha
--
mcginnis at ucalgary.ca