Andrea D. S
IMS
(Northwestern University)
BCS nominal syncretism, feature structure and false agreement
Homophony within an inflectional paradigm, a.k.a. syncretism, is a central feature of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) nominal morphology. For example, the accusative singular is syncretic with the nominative singular for o-stem masculine inanimates (e.g., prozor ‘window.
NOMSG / ACCSG
’). Zwicky (1991) argues that this type of systematic syncretism represents a shared morphological representation, but the exact nature of the structural identity is unclear in his account. There are at least two competing hypotheses.
Noyer (1998) argues for an Impoverishment account, in which the relevant featural distinctions (e.g., NOM and ACC ) are neutralized for syncretic forms. Stump (2006) argues that syncretism represents the union of features. These two approaches make different predictions with regard to syntactic agreement, and false agreement in particular. In this paper I use speakers’ judgments of BCS agreement to test for the feature structure underlying systematic syncretism.
False agreement is a locality effect in which an agreement target takes as its controller an immediately preceding word/phrase, rather than the word/phrase dictated by the syntactic structure. For example, in the structure [NP
SG
[P NP
PL
]] V, the verb should take singular agreement according to the syntactic structure, but many speakers find
English examples of plural agreement acceptable, even preferable (Cowart 2006). Plural marking on the verb represents false agreement; we can call NP
PL
the false trigger. False agreement has been mostly studied in English.
The case structure of BCS adds a further complication to false agreement: nonnominative case on the N closest to the target V should inhibit false number agreement because verbs agree for number with nominative subjects. Nominative case should promote it. Stump’s and Noyer’s accounts differ on whether a nominative feature is present in BCS nom = acc syncretism. When a preposition subcategorizes for an accusative noun, that noun carries both a nominative and an accusative value within a feature union account, but does not carry a nominative feature within an Impoverishment account. Thus, if syncretic forms represent a union of inflectional features, false agreement should be more acceptable when the false trigger is accusative but systematically syncretic with the nominative than when it is accusative but not syncretic.
If syncretic forms represent neutralization of features, syncretic and non-syncretic nouns should be equally unlikely to trigger false agreement.
I present data from a questionnaire in which native BCS speakers judge the acceptability of sentences using magnitude estimation (Bard 1996). The questionnaire permutes three factors with two levels each (= 8 conditions): (a) nouns with same/different number marking, (b) accusative syncretic/not syncretic with nominative,
(c) false agreement/syntactically correct agreement. I predict results consistent with unified feature structure, meaning that I predict BCS speakers to treat the structures in (1) as a hierarchy, with (a) representing the most acceptable structures and (f) the least acceptable structures.
(1) a. [N
NOMPL
[P N
ACCPL(sync/no sync)
]] V
PL

b. [N
NOMPL
[P N
ACCSG(no sync)
]] V
PL c. [N
NOMPL
[P N
ACCSG(sync)
]] V
PL d. [N
NOMPL
[P N
ACCSG(sync)
]] V
SG e. [N
NOMPL
[P N
ACCSG(no sync)
]] V
SG f. [N
NOMPL
[P N
ACCPL(sync/no sync)
]] V
SG