Speaker: Jonathan David Bobaljik (University of Connecticut)
Title: Idiosyncratic syncretic patterns: Some Chukotko-Kamchatkan evidence
Time: Friday, November 20, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141
Syncretism (homophony within paradigms) has played a significant (if somewhat controversial) role in morphological theory. There is relatively broad agreement that there are no limits on the patterns of surface homophony that may be attested. In addition to stipulated accidental homophony, many current theories have powerful mechanisms (feature-manipulating rules, for example) that ultimately allow for essentially any pattern to be described. In this talk, I aim to support the rather conservative notion that there is nevertheless a line to be drawn between natural syncretic patterns on the one hand, and idiosyncratic patterns on the other. The natural patterns are those that can be represented as underspecification of vocabulary items (exponents), while the idiosyncratic patterns require the invocation of special rules, the residue of contingent factors such as historical changes.
I start with a brief discussion of a feature inventory motivated by categorical universals in the area of person marking, which are independent of the issue of syncretism. I show that this feature inventory defines a division between natural and idiosyncratic patterns that is robustly supported by the distribution of language types in large scale surveys (thus converging with Pertsova 2007 over a different sample). I then turn to an in-depth investigation of one set of extremely idiosyncratic patterns in a single language family, looking at the reflexes of Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan agreement prefix *næ-. Comrie (1980) has famously discussed this prefix as providing evidence for a functional “inverse” alignment in these paradigms, leading to a complicated form:function mismatch, and requiring a theory in which rules of vocabulary insertion are governed by constraints on the overall shape of the paradigm. Continuing a line of work arguing against appeals to such paradigm-level constraints (e.g., Bobaljik 2002, 2008), I argue that the proper description of the quirky Chukotko-Kamchatkan facts is best stated in terms of deletion (impoverishment) rules (ranging over specific features, or in some cases entire terminal nodes, cf. Arregi & Nevins 2007, Calabrese 2008), but that the explanation of these rules is entirely diachronic. An appeal to paradigmatic constraints is neither sufficient, nor necessary to explain the observed idiosyncratic syncretic patterns.