Syncretism
Having inventoried a variety of ways in which inflection is expressed cross-linguistically, we now turn to syncretism. We speak of syncretism when a single inflected form corresponds to more than one set of morphosyntactic features (this definition is paraphrased from Spencer 1991: 45). Syncretism is common cross-linguistically, and it raises a number of questions relevant to morphological theory. In keeping with the non-theoretical approach, we limit ourselves to presenting a few examples of sycretism from Stump (2001), and, for further discussion, we refer the reader to that work (pp. 212–41).
The first examples that we present come from Bulgarian (Stump 2001: 39, 213). In the Bulgarian imperfect and aorist paradigms, the second person singular and third person singular forms are identical. (The aorist is a past tense.) We show this in (19) for the verbs krad ‘steal’ and igráj ‘play’ (these are the citation forms of the lexemes):
In (19), -š is a preterite suffix and -e is 3sg agreement. We see here that a single inflectional form such as kráde may express more than one set of morphosyntactic features: 2sg aorist or 3sg aorist.
Romanian also displays widespread syncretism. For many verbs, the first-person singular in the present indicative paradigm is identical to the third person plural form. We show this in (20). Both 1sg and 3pl forms are in boldface (data from Stump 2001: 213–14):
In (20), the infinitives are put in small caps because they are used as the citation forms of the lexeme. The numbers (2, 3, 4) under the glosses are the numbers of the conjugations these three verbs fall into. Syncretism in the present indicative does not take place in Romanian verbs of the first conjugation.
