Syncretism without underspecification: The role of leading forms

Abstract

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 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 ).