syncretism w/o paradigms

[Andrew Nevins]

>There's something unnerving to me about the Impoverishment analysis
>you sketched above.  I've always felt that Impoverishment rules
>should be posited only for 'special cases', i.e. when syntactic
>representations and Vocab underspecification can't account for the
>facts at hand.  Using it for cases of metasyncretism seems to lose
>the distinction between 'general cases' of syncretism (which are also
>consistent with Vocab underspecification) and these 'special cases',
>e.g. a case from Piedmontese described by Bonet, where the 1pl
>reflexive clitic looks like the default 3rd person reflexive, instead
>of like the 1sg reflexive.

I think I disagree. Take the systematic absence of gender
distinctions in the plural in Russian. On the VI view, it
is an accident that every Case+Plural affix happens to
be underspecified for Gender. On the impoverishment view,
the generalization that Gender is completely absent in the
Plural is captured, irrespective of the features realized by
individual VIs.

I guess I am going for the impoverishment in marked-environment
view: Languages that make Gender distinctions in the singular
but Zap them in the plural do so because the Plural is already
a marked environment. Using the H&R feature geometry, where number
of nodes directly reflects markedness, allows this to fall out
in a natural way.

AIN