Syncretism without Underspecification in Optimality Theory: 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 tools like underspecification or rules of referral that are 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 selection of unfaithful leading forms as a last resort to avoid paradigmatic gaps: The minimally unfaithful leading form exponent spreads to an empty paradigm cell. Three well-studied empirical domains figure in the analysis: (i) determiner inflection in German (Bierwisch (1967), Wiese (1999)), (ii) Italian object clitics (Grimshaw (2001)), and (iii) animacy effects with noun inflection in Russian (Wunderlich (2004)). 1. Syncretism by Underspecification Underspecification of morphological exponents (inflection markers) with respect to morpho-syntactic features is proposed as a general method to account for instances of syncretism (systematic homonymy) in morphological paradigms in Jakobson (1962a;b). This method is formally refined and extended in Bierwisch (1967). Underspecification is adopted as a means to derive syncretism in a variety of contemporary morphological theories, such as Distributed Morphology (see Halle &Marantz (1993; 1994), Noyer (1992), Halle (1997), and Harley & Noyer (2003), among others), A-Morphous Morphology (see Anderson (1992)), Paradigm Function Morphology (see Stump (2001)), Minimalist Morphology (see Wunderlich (1996; 1997b)), and Net*For discussions leading to the present version of this paper, I am grateful to Antje Lahne, Andreas Opitz, Jochen Trommer, Philipp Weisser, and the participants of the meeting of the DFG-network Core Mechanisms of Exponence in Leipzig in January 2008. The research documented here was supported by a DFG grant to the project Argument Encoding in Morphology and Syntax, as part of Forschergruppe 742. Varieties of Competition, 81-132 Fabian Heck, Gereon Müller & Jochen Trommer (eds.) Linguistische Arbeits Berichte 87, Universität Leipzig 2008