Jianyuan Wang

535 Assignment 8

Bobaljik, Syncretism without paradigms

Due: Thurs, Feb.  12

1.    What Distributed Morphology operation can capture the same syncretic patterns as Williams' entry points?

Impoverishment

2.    Which forms of the verb 'be' in English does Williams treat as accidentally homophonous?

1^st sg. past ‘was’ and 3^rd sg. past ‘was’

3.    Looking at all the 1st person forms of Romanian in 16 and 17, speculate on why Stump came to the conclusion that -m was the exponent of 1pl, and not just 1? (1 sentence)

All 1^st pl. forms (i.e., imperfect and indicative) end in –m, but only the 1^st sg. imperfect ends in –m.

4.   Why can't the feminine singular paradigm be the Instantiated Basic Paradigm of Russian nominals for Williams? Why can't the masculine singular paradigm? (2 sentences).

The dative case and the prepositional case are not distinguished in the feminine singular paradigm, while they are in the masculine singular paradigm. The accusative is not distinguished from the nominative or genitive in the masculine singular paradigm, whereas in the feminine singular paradigm all the three cases exhibit distinct endings.