Syncretism and neutralization in the marking of romance object agreement

This paper is part of a larger research, which aims to pick up the aspects which can be of interest for morphological theory from the empirical domain which is familiar to Romance scholars under the heading «past participle [= PtP] agreement» (in perfective periphrastics). This is no doubt a much-investigated domain, which however has been studied mostly with focus on the syntax rather than on the morphology. In a previous paper (Loporcaro 2008), I proposed that Romance PtP agreement has to be considered as object agreement, although differing from canonical instances of object agreement familiar from the literature in linguistic typology. I then sketched a tentative inventory of the different kinds of interaction between the syntactic conditions which constrain object agreement and the participial morphology which serves its expression. In doing that, in that context, I did not touch upon syncretism, which is the topic of the present paper. I will review the different patterns of syncretism documented across Romance in the inflectional paradigm of PtPs. The results of the research include, on the theoretical side, a) a modified definition of (canonical) syncretism (as opposed to neutralization, cf. Baerman et al. 2005), and b) the rejection of the distinction between default and neutral agreement (cf. Corbett 2006). As for the empirical results of the study, an inventory of occurring syncretisms will be produced, from which some synchronic and diachronic regularities will emerge. The results will also turn out to correspond, rather unexpectedly, to some other morphological regularities (e.g. in the shape of the paradigms of possessive pronouns; cf. Barbato 2008), as well as to some purportedly syntactic phenomena (e.g. loss of agreement with object clitics in Catalan, cf. Wheeler 1988:194), for which a morphological motivation can be spotted. References Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown & Greville G. Corbett. 2005. The Syntax-Morphology Interface. A Study of Syncretism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barbato, Marcello. 2008. Il principio di dissimilazione e il plurale di I classe (con excursus sul destino di TUUS SUUS e sull’analogia). Ms. Bruxelles, ULB. Corbett, Greville G. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loporcaro, Michele. 2008. Variation and change in morphology and syntax. Romance object agreement. Paper given at the 13th International Morphology Meeting, Vienna, February 3-6, 2008. Wheeler, Max W. 1988a. Catalan. In: Martin Harris & Nigel Vincent (eds.), The Romance Languages. London & Sidney: Croom Helm, 170-208.