Morphology

, Volume 27, Issue 1, pp 1–20 | Cite as

Segmentation: a remark on the Syncretism Principle

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Abstract

Morphological analyses usually prefer ‘deriving’ form-identities as systematic syncretism over just stating them in terms of accidental homophony. While such anti-homophony is mostly assumed implicitly, Müller (2004) spells it out more explicitly as violable Syncretism Principle guiding both language acquisition and linguistic analysis (‘same form → same meaning’). However, as soon as the child or linguist decomposes word forms into smaller formatives (morpheme segmentation, subanalysis), it is unclear what instances of form-identity exactly are to be avoided (e.g. substring-identities?). This paper frames the logical space of possible Syncretism Principle interpretations, which relate to their functional motivation (ambiguity avoidance) demonstrating their concrete consequences for analysis with a paradigm learning algorithm offering segmentation and meaning assignment.

Keywords

Inflection Homophony Morpheme segmentation Learning algorithms 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jochen Trommer for the initial and ongoing discussions that lead to this paper, which started out as appendix to a joint manuscript on inflectional learning (Bank and Trommer 2012). I also thank the editor Adam Albright and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are of course my own.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Institut für LinguistikUniversität LeipzigLeipzigGermany

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