On containment and syncretism in English preterites and participles

Abstract

This study explores Bobaljik's (2012) suggestion that in English, the feature representation of the preterite contains the representation of the past participle. While containment analyses in both Distributed Morphology (DM) and Nanosyntax capture the virtual absence of ABA patterns of syncretism for the order BASE-PARTICIPLE-PRETERITE, I demonstrate that they face empirical challenges when the exponence of the suffixes is considered. After evaluating an alternative feature decomposition, I show how a DM containment approach can derive the facts for both base and suffix alternations with the aid of impoverishment, which also helps to explain counterexamples to *ABA in this domain. Lastly, I offer cautionary discussion about the relationship between containment structures and deriving *ABA.

*ABA pronominal stem allomorphy without containment

“…In the decade and change following Bobaljik's (2012) masterful analysis of comparative suppletion, there has been an efflorescence of work on so-called *ABA environments: pockets of natural language morphology in which non-adjacent categories within a paradigm fail to co-supplete or co-syncretize to the exclusion of intervening categories. *ABA phenomena have been spotted in a panoply of domains, to include pronouns (Ganenkov 2018, Smith et al 2019, Middleton 2021, case (Caha 2008(Caha , 2017McFadden 2018;Zompì 2019;Davis 2021), number (Mare 2021), gender (Gray & Gregor 2019), tense and temporality (Franco 2013, Adamson 2019, possessives (Van Baal & Don 2018), complementizers (Wiland 2018)-and most recently, honorifics (Truong 2022) and fractionals (Sudo & Nevins 2022) In the AAA case, root constancy is maintained throughout the paradigm. In the ABB case, co-suppletion obtains across the two non-positive grades.…”

*ABA effects in kinship allomorphy & syncretism

“…Significantly, Bobaljik's analysis provides a proof of principle for the use of surface *ABA distributions in order to diagnose the presence and character of syntactic hierarchical structure. Containment phenomena have since been argued to be active in the organization of case (Caha 2008), pronouns (Smith et al 2018), nominalizations (Jabłońska & Marinov 2011), clusivity (Moskal 2018), tense/aspect (Adamson 2019), inter multa alia. Two conundra loom large across this expanding body of work.…”