The causative–instrumental syncretism

Jewish Teenagers’ Syncretism

Inflectional Syncretism And Corpora

This paper describes a novel undertaking: comparing the relationship between grammatical ambiguity (syncretism) in nouns, as represented in a default inheritance hierarchy, with textual frequency distributions. In order to do this we consider a language with a reasonable number of grammatical distinctions and where syncretism occurs in different morphological classes. We investigated this relat...

Nominative-Accusative Syncretism and Syntactic Case

Syncretism without Underspecification: The Role of Leading Forms

The main goal of this article is to outline a new approach to syncretism in optimality theory, one that does not rely on the concept of underspecification taken over from grammatical theories which do not recognize constraint ranking and constraint violability. The analysis is based on a concept of morphological exponents as leading forms. Instances of syncretism can be traced back to the selec...

Directionality and (un)natural Classes in Syncretism

Syncretism, where a single form corresponds to multiple morphosyntactic functions, is pervasive in languages with inflectional morphology. Its interpretation highlights the contrast between different views of the status of morphology. For some, morphology lacks independent structure, and syncretism reflects the internal structure of morphosyntactic features. For others, morphological structure ...