Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Phonology Circle - 2/8 - Patrick Jones

Phonology Circle resumes next Monday, with a brief organizational meeting followed by a talk by Patrick Jones. If you would like to present this semester, please come prepared to claim a date, or contact Adam ahead of time.

Speaker: Patrick Jones
When: Monday 2/8, 5pm
Where: 32-D831

Within Distributed Morphology, syncretisms (i.e. cases in which a morpheme appears in more than one cell of a morphological paradigm) are typically analyzed as resulting either from featural underspecification of Vocabulary Items or from feature-deleting Impoverishments of terminal nodes; apparent cases of syncretism that cannot be so explained are generally treated as “accidental” syncretisms in which two morphemes simply happen to have the same phonological shape. In this talk, however, I discuss a case of syncretism in Kinande (Bantu, D42) which, while it cannot be satisfactorily analyzed in terms of underspecification or impoverishment, cannot be analyzed as an instance of accidental homophony either. The syncretism involves the inflectional suffix */ire/*, which occurs both in forms expressing Perfect Aspect and in (a subset of) forms expressing Recent Past Tense. I show that the heterogeneous range of contexts in which */ire/*/ /appears precludes an Impoverishment-based or Underspecification-based account of its distribution. However, I also present evidence from phonological and morphosyntactic processes showing that it is a single */ire/*/ /morpheme – and not a number of homophononous */ire/*/ /morphemes – that appears in all of these contexts. I conclude with a discussion of possible mechanisms whereby the single Vocabulary Item */ire/*/ /is made to occur in the range of contexts in which it does.