Speaker: Stanislao Zompì (Universität Potsdam) and Zhouyi Sun (MIT)
Title: *ABA and Successive Containment Reexamined, or How to Assemble Russian Dolls Properly
Time: Thursday, November 7, 5-6pm
Location: 32-D769
Abstract: The last decade has witnessed the success of vocabulary item-based approaches to morphology in accounting for the typological gap in suppletion or syncretism patterns dubbed *ABAin some triplet of categories ?C?, C?, C??, C? and C? can never have the identical form to the exclusion of C? (see Caha 2009, 2013; Bobaljik 2012; Smith et al. 2019, among others). An entailment relation has been established between successive containment and *ABA, where a successive featural/structural containment relation among three categories serves as a sufficient condition for these categories to be ABA-free under both Underspecification and Overspecification.
As Caha (2017) as well as Christopoulous and Zompì (2022) have recently pointed out, featural relations other than successive containment might also lead to *ABA. It is thus unclear what the necessary condition for *ABA is regarding featural relations, which this presentation aims to derive. We show that the necessary and sufficient condition for *ABA has exactly the same form as the weak containment relation posited by Christopoulos and Zompì (2022).
Implications of this result on how successive featural containment should be more properly deduced from the empirical absence of ABA patterns among three categories will be discussed. We argue it can further demonstrate the intrinsic inadequacy of Underspecification and Overspecification without relying on any particular assumption of featural decomposition (cf. McFadden 2018; Christopoulos and Zompì 2022; Zomp?? 2023). If time permits, a new optimization-based proposal which does not face the same problems will be sketched.