[Lingtyp] What is the opposite of syncretism?

[Martin Haspelmath]

I'd say that the "opposite" of syncretism is suppletion:

syncretism: expression of inflectional meanings A, B, C by a single form 
F in different situations

suppletion: expression of a single inflectional meaning M by forms A, B, 
C in different situations

It seems that this is what Cat Butz described for Dalkalaen ("plural 
being marked differently in all four persons"): different suppletive 
plural markers depending on the context.

But the term "suppletion" is most commonly used for roots (e.g. 
/go/wen(-t)/, /one/firs(-t)/), and many people would prefer "allomorphy" 
(though this latter term is also used for phonological variants of the 
same form rather than different forms).

In a different sense of "opposite", one could say that the opposite of 
syncretism (= grammatical coexpression) is simply "non-syncretism" (= 
grammatical disexpression, or disgrammification), cf. Alexandre 
François's earlier comment.

In any event, "syncretism" is a weird term – it was originally limited 
to diachronic change in inflectional paradigms, and while it is deeply 
entrenched in discussions of inflection, it's prtobably best not to use 
it more generally.

Best,

Martin

Cat Butz wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I'm presenting a pronoun paradigm of Dalkalaen this week at the 
> Affixes symposium in Turku. It exhibits both some very weird 
> syncretism (same marking of 1EX and 2nd person) and the opposite of 
> that (e.g. plural being marked differently in all four persons). What 
> do we call that? Just differential marking?

Alexandre François wrote:

> In the domain of the lexicon, I've been calling the former 
> configuration “colexification” (similar to syncretism);  and the 
> opposite, “dislexification”  (cf. the contrast /con-junct 
> ///dis-junct/, etc).
> Martin Haspelmath has recently 
> <https://twitter.com/haspelmath/status/1688937593403060224> proposed 
> to extend this sort of contrast to grammatical morphemes, using 
> “cogrammification” (including cases of /morphological syncretism/), 
> and “coexpression” in general.  For the opposite, one could propose 
> “disgrammification” and “disexpression”, but I don't see those terms 
> in Martin's handout <https://zenodo.org/record/8223665>. Otherwise, 
> the standard terms, I guess, are simply “formal distinction” or 
> “formal contrast”. (Maybe other people on the list will think of 
> different terms.)

-- 
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/
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