On containment and syncretism in English preterites and participles

Authors

  • Luke Adamson University of Pennsylvania

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4555

Keywords:

ABA, containment, syncretism, Elsewhere Condition, allomorphy, Dis- tributed Morphology, Nanosyntax, impoverishment, overlapping decomposition

Abstract

This study explores Bobaljik's (2012) suggestion that in English, the feature representation of the preterite contains the representation of the past participle. While containment analyses in both Distributed Morphology (DM) and Nanosyntax capture the virtual absence of ABA patterns of syncretism for the order BASE-PARTICIPLE-PRETERITE, I demonstrate that they face empirical challenges when the exponence of the suffixes is considered. After evaluating an alternative feature decomposition, I show how a DM containment approach can derive the facts for both base and suffix alternations with the aid of impoverishment, which also helps to explain counterexamples to *ABA in this domain. Lastly, I offer cautionary discussion about the relationship between containment structures and deriving *ABA.

Author Biography

  • Luke Adamson, University of Pennsylvania
    Adamson is a 5th year Linguistics PhD Student at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Published

2019-03-21

How to Cite

Adamson, Luke. 2019. “On Containment and Syncretism in English Preterites and Participles”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 4 (1): 54:1–15. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4555.