syncretism w/o paradigms

[Martha McGinnis]

To continue!:

>  Does anyone know of acquisition studies of any kind about syncretism
>  and features? My (very limited) understanding is that children
>  overgeneralize regular to irregular, but that it is claimed that they
>  do not overgeneralize agreement morphemes in the manner that
>  underspecification would suggest.

A couple of references: Poeppel & Wexler's 1993 Language paper
discusses this for German, and Colin Phillips has a MITWPL 26 paper
that discusses it for German (based on Clahsen & Penke 1992) and
Italian (based on Guasti 1992).  Part of Colin's paper is included in
a Lang Acq paper to appear -- not sure if these facts are in there,
but both are on his website anyway.

>English geometries other than 3sg are subject to a radical
>Impoverishment rule reducing them to a bare RE node (Bonet-style
>retreat-to-the-unmarked Impoverishment)
>
>   (this is for a marked treatment of -s)
>
>-s is unmarked; there is one or more zero-morphs realizing the other
>present tense agreement features.
>
>    (this would be an unmarked treatment of -s)
>
>of course the latter would predict the i'se the b'y dialects well, but
>it doesn't predict the 2nd person/pl elsewhere-looking forms in the 'to
>be' paradigm (confirmed by the 'aren't I' inversion.
>
>anyone remotely sympathetic to the latter?

Me.  Also, I believe, John Frampton, who has a CLS 38 paper arguing
(on metasyncretic grounds!) that 1sg is impoverished in Germanic
generally, leading to the 1/3sg syncretism with 'be'.  His analysis
makes extensive use of negative feature values, but I think it could
be recast along the lines you suggest -- in fact, I think Andrew
Nevins may have done this in his 2003 LSA talk.

OK, my brain is now picked clean.  I need to go home.

Cheers,
Martha
--
mcginnis at ucalgary.ca