Cross-linguistic generalizations about grammatical contexts favoring syncretism often have an implicational form. This paper shows that this is expected if (i) morphological paradigms are required to be both as small and as unambiguous as possible, (ii) languages may prioritize these requirements differently, and (iii) probability distributions for grammatical features interacting in syncretic patterns are fixed across languages. More specifically, this approach predicts that grammatical contexts that are less probable or more informative about a target grammatical feature $ T $ should favor syncretism of $ T $ cross-linguistically. The paper provides evidence for these predictions based on four detailed case studies involving well-known patterns of contextual syncretism (gender syncretism based on number, gender syncretism based on person, aspect syncretism based on tense, and case syncretism based on animacy).

中文翻译：

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形态融合中的隐含概括：交际偏见的作用

关于有利于融合的语法上下文的跨语言概括通常具有暗示形式。本文表明，如果 (i) 形态范式被要求尽可能小且尽可能明确，(ii) 语言可以不同地优先考虑这些要求，以及 (iii) 在融合模式中交互的语法特征的概率分布是跨语言固定。更具体地说，这种方法预测语法上下文不太可能或更多关于目标语法特征的信息 $ T $ 应该有利于融合 $ T $ 跨语言。本文基于四个详细的案例研究为这些预测提供了证据，这些案例研究涉及众所周知的上下文融合模式（基于数字的性别融合、基于人的性别融合、基于时态的方面融合和基于活力的案例融合）。