Syncretism (to appear in Language and Linguistics Compass 1)

1 INTRODUCTION. If inflectional morphology were perfectly straightforward, a listing of the inflected forms of a word for a given language would at the same time give us a list of the morphosyntactic values relevant for that language. For example in Yir-Yoront (1), a Pama-Nyungan language from the Cape York Peninsula, Australia, the distinct forms displayed by such words as 'foot' or 'leg' justify distinguishing an absolutive, ergative and dative case. ABSOLUTIVE thaml kumn puth ngamrr ERGATIVE thamarr kumalh putha ngumurr DATIVE thamarriy kuman putha ngumurr On the other hand, words such as 'arm' and 'armpit' fail to make the distinction between ergative and dative-these words then show syncretism of case. This apparent merger of morphosyntactic values in a single form can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, it might simply be an indication that morphological structure may diverge from functional structure. On the other hand, there has long been an intuition that this identity reflects some fundamental affinity at the level of meaning or function (Plank 1991). In formal terms, we might view it as a window into the otherwise covert structure of morphosyntactic feature systems, i.e. revealing the building blocks of functional or semantic structure. It is safe to say that, for linguistic theory as a whole, it is the latter interpretation which has attracted the most attention, particularly since Jakobson (1936) and Hjelmslev (1935-37). On this approach, distinct morphosyntactic values may collapse if they overlap in meaning or function, and it is this shared element which is expressed by the single form. For example, in the Dagestanian language Xinalug, masculine and feminine gender are distinct in the singular, but typically combined in the plural, thus xaekindaedumae 'he'll laugh', xaeskinkkudaemae 'she'll laugh', but xaepkindaemae 'they'll laugh (masculine or feminine)' (Dešeriev 1959:56). This syncretism is readily analysed ('masculine' + 'feminine' = 'human'), and represents a cross-linguistically common pattern, so it is probably not a language-specific morphological quirk. Comparing this sort of data from various languages, one can start to build up a picture of shared aspects of feature structure (see e. But not all syncretism lends itself to a straightforward interpretation, and languages abound in patterns which are obscure in some way or other. It is the purpose of the present article to present a typology of patterns which are attested, and consider what implications these potentially have for models of morphology and morphosyntactic feature structure. …