Fusional morphology, metasyncretism, and secondary exponence

A morphemic, realizational approach to Latin declension

Abstract

Using Latin as a case study, we show that Lexical-Realizational Functional Grammar (a union between a morpheme-based realizational morphology and the nonderivational, constraint-based syntactic framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar) is able to offer insights into two fundamentally important morphological phenomena. The first of these is metasyncretism, which is of particular interest because it is a (putative) paradigmatic effect, yet LRFG does not have paradigms as theoretical objects. Syncretism is captured via cascading macros (i.e., templates), such that a macro for one case value may also call another macro with a different case value, leading to case containment which models a feature hierarchy. We also use the same approach for gender and number. Metasyncretism is handled through a single vocabulary item mapping to a disjunction of two or more possible exponents. The second phenomenon of interest is secondary exponence (or morphological conditioning). This is handled through the addition of constraints to the (relevant) vocabulary items corresponding to their conditioning environments.