Speaker: Juan Cancel (MIT)
Title: Cross-Categorial Syncretisms: Theoretical Predictions and Empirical Observations
Time: Thursday, December 4th, 5pm – 6pm
Location: 32-D769
Abstract: Syncretisms and their generalizations have been the topic of much discussion in the morphological literature for a few years already (ex: Caha 2009, Starke 2017, Zompì 2023, etc). Nonetheless, a kind of syncretism that hasn’t been addressed much in that same literature are syncretisms that span the paradigms of different lexical categories (ex: nouns and verbs). In this presentation, I will be looking at these ‘cross-categorial syncretisms’ in terms of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993), argue about why we should expect them to exist, and make note of what specific features we would expect to behave as such. Finally, I will go over various examples from language families such as Turkic, Inuit-Yupik-Unangan, and Uralic in order to show not only that they indeed exist, but that they seem to behave in ways that comply with our theoretical frameworks as well.