Where word forms collide: a typology of syncretism

Syncretism is a surprising yet widespread and poorly understood phenomenon in natural language. Given a regular distinction such as present versus past, as in English help/helped, work/worked, laugh/laughed, we might not expect to find instances like bid, which can be present or past (we now bid five pounds, though yesterday we bid ten pounds). The form bid, is said to be an instance of syncretism, a single form fulfilling two different functions. Thus syncretism is found even in English, whose inflectional morphology (system of different word-forms) is simple in comparison with many languages. The proposed project will document the phenomenon and offer a theoretical account.

First we will look at a range of languages of different types (some languages, for instance, have thousands of (inflectional) forms of a single word, unlike the very few which are possible in English). We will develop a database of the different instances of syncretism in these various languages. This will be both the stimulus and the control for a theory of syncretism, which we shall construct within the general framework of Network Morphology, which we have developed. Network Morphology theories are encoded in the lexical knowledge representation language DATR, which means that they can be checked computationally to ensure that they are indeed consistent with the data they claim to explain.

Outputs

Electronic Resources

Baerman, Matthew. 2002. Syncretism: an annotated bibliography. <http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/MB/Bibliography.htm>.

Baerman, Matthew. 2002. The Surrey Person Syncretism Database. <http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/personsyncretism/index.aspx>.

Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown and Greville Corbett. 2002. The Surrey Syncretisms Database. <http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/syncretism/index.aspx>.

The following articles and presentations have arisen wholly or in part from the project:

Publications

Baerman, Matthew. 2001a. Unnatural classes in morphological change. Russian Linguistics
25/2. 281-284.

Baerman, Matthew. 2001b. The prosodic properties of ne in Bulgarian. In: Gerhild Zybatow, Uwe Junghanns, Grit Mehlhorn and Luka Szucsich (eds.) Current issues in formal Slavic linguistics. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 59-68.

Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown and Greville Corbett. 2002. Case syncretism in and out of Indo-European. In: Mary Andronis, Christopher Ball, Heidi Elston and Sylvain Neuvel (eds.) CLS 37: The Main Session. Papers from the 37th Meeting of the ChicagoLinguistic Society, Vol. 1. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 15-28.

Brown, Dunstan. 2001. Constructing a typological database for inflectional morphology: the SMG database for syncretism In: Steven Bird, Peter Buneman and Mark Liberman (eds.) Proceedings of  the IRCS Workshop on Linguistic Databases. Philadelphia: Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania. 56-64. [Paper available at <http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/database/proceedings.html>;

 abstract and slides available at

<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/database/program.html>.]

Corbett, Greville, Matthew Baerman and Dunstan Brown. 2002. Domains of syncretism: a demonstration of the autonomy of morphology. In: Mary Andronis, Christopher Ball, Heidi Elston and Sylvain Neuvel (eds.) CLS 37: The Panels. Papers from the 37th Meeting of the ChicagoLinguistic Society, Vol. 2. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 385-398.

Evans, Nicholas, Dunstan Brown and Greville Corbett. 2001. Dalabon pronominal prefixes and the typology of syncretism: a Network Morphology analysis. In: Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle (eds.) Yearbook of Morphology 2000. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 187-231.

Presentations

Baerman, Matthew. 1999. The prosodic properties of ne in Bulgarian. Third European Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages, Leipzig, Germany, December 1-3.

Baerman, Matthew. 2000a. Defaults and syncretism in the Latvian noun paradigm. British Association for the Advancement of Slavonic Studies 2000 conference, University of Cambridge, April 1-3.

Baerman, Matthew. 2000b. Contrary syncretic structure. Linguistic Association of Great Britain Spring 2000 meeting, University College, London, April 6-8.

Baerman, Matthew. 2000c. Is there a semantic basis for person syncretism in verb forms? ESRC seminar series ‘Methods and Models in Morphology’, University of Sussex, November 17.

Baerman, Matthew. 2001a. The typology of syncretism in two-argument verbs. Linguistics Association of Great Britain, Spring Meeting 2001, University of Leeds, April 5-7.

Baerman, Matthew. 2001b. The interpretation of person syncretism. Association for Linguistic Typology IV conference, University of Californiaat Santa Barbara, July 19-22.

Baerman, Matthew. 2001c. Resolving rule competition. ESRC seminar series ‘Methods and Models in Morphology’, University of Essex, December 7.

Baerman, Matthew. 2002a. Against ordered rules. Linguistics Association of Great Britain, Edgehill College of Higher Education, April 9-11.

Baerman, Matthew. 2002b. Rules of referral without directionality. ESRC seminar series ‘Methods and Models in Morphology’, School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London, May 24.

Baerman, Matthew. 2002c. Indexing and directionality in inflection. Linguistics Association of Great Britain, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, September 17-19.

Baerman, Matthew. 2002d. Results of the SurreySyncretism Project. Paper presented to Surrey Linguistic Circle, October 11.

Baerman, Matthew and Dunstan Brown. 2001. Slavonic syncretisms. 1 April British Association for the Advancement of Slavonic Studies 2001 conference, University of Cambridge, April 7-9.

Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown and Greville Corbett. 2001. Case syncretism in and out of Indo-European. Chicago Linguistic Society 37 conference, University of Chicago, April 19-21.

Brown, Dunstan 2000a.  What would morphomic suppletion look like?  International Workshop on Suppletion ‘Suppletion 2000’, Stockholm University, May 26-28.

Brown, Dunstan. 2000b.  The Surrey Syncretisms Database: design and preliminary results. ESRC seminar series ‘Methods and Models in Morphology’, University of Essex, June 22.

Brown, Dunstan. 2000c. Whatdrives ambiguity? Paper presented to Surrey Linguistic Circle, November 23.

Brown, Dunstan. 2001a. Features as context and content of syncretism ESRC seminar series ‘Methods and Models in Morphology’, University of Surrey, February 9.

Brown, Dunstan. 2001b. A database of inflectional syncretism. Typological Database Project workshop, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, June 29-30.

Brown, Dunstan. 2001c.  Constructing a typological database for inflectional morphology: the SMG database for syncretism.  IRCS Workshop on Linguistic Databases, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania, December 11-13.

Brown, Dunstan. 2002. Report on Current Project. Language Typology Resource Centre, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, September 26, 2002.

Corbett, Greville. 1999. Defectiveness, syncretism, suppletion, ‘deponency’: four dimensions for a typology of inflectional systems. Invited paper at the Second Mediterranean Meeting on Morphology, Lija, Malta, September 10-12.

Corbett, Greville. 2000a. A typology of inflectional systems and the notion ‘possible word’. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, January 18.

Corbett, Greville. 2000b. A typology of the morphological range of lexemes (with special reference to syncretism). Paper delivered 2 February at the Second Winter Typological School, Russian State University of the Humanities, Istra, Moscow district, January 31-February 6.

Corbett, Greville. 2000c. Morphology, typology, computation. Invited paper delivered  27 April for the 9^th International Morphology Meeting, Vienna, February 25-27.

Corbett, Greville. 2000d. 9 March 2000. Possible words: a Network Morphology perspective. Linguistics Department colloquium, University of California, Santa Barbara, March 9.

Corbett, Greville. 2000e. Four inflectional phenomena and the notion possible lexical item. Second Northwest Conference on Slavic Linguistics, Berkeley, 10-11 March.

Corbett, Greville. 2000f. Extremes of inflectional morphology in Slavonic. British Association for the Advancement of Slavonic Studies 2000 conference, University of Cambridge, April 1-3.

Corbett, Greville. 2000g. Possible words: four inflectional phenomena for defining the extremes. Falmer Language Group Seminar, University of Sussex, May 15.

Corbett, Greville. 2000h. Word limits: a perspective from inflectional morphology. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,  Leipzig, July 17.

Corbett, Greville. 2000g. Domains of syncretism: a typological perspective on Slavonic. 26th Meeting of the Internation Commission on the Grammatical Structure of the Slavonic Languages, Männedorf, near Zürich, October 22-23.

Corbett, Greville, Matthew Baerman and Dunstan Brown. 2001. Domains of syncretism: a demonstration of the autonomy of morphology. Chicago Linguistic Society 37 conference, University of Chicago, April 19-21.