Abstract
In this paper, I present an analysis of pseudo-ABA patterns of morphology found in pronominal forms. I argue that an analysis that assumes unrestricted phonologically null allomorphy or unrestricted impoverishment overgenerates, allowing all the logically possible patterns of syncretism to appear. An analysis that includes spanned portmanteau exponents generates all and only the attested patterns of syncretism. Pseudo-ABA patterns arise when the complete pronominal tree (the structure for the anaphor) is exponed by a spanned exponent for [a [d]] and an exponent for p. Spanned portmanteau exponents are compatible with an analysis in which a and d are cyclic nodes, and one in which they are not. However, the analysis in which a and d are cyclic nodes is incompatible with another morphological behaviour of pronominal forms, namely variable exponence. To provide a unified analysis of pseudo-ABA patterns and variable exponence, a and d cannot be cyclic nodes.
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Notes
The term anaphor for locally-bound variables is well-established, being derived from the Ancient Greek aná ‘up’ and phérō ‘I carry’. Continuing with Ancient Greek, diaphor is a neologism, formed from diá, ‘at variance’ and phérō. This ensures that the term diaphor is consistent with the rest of the phor family: anaphor, cataphor, endophor, exophor, logophor.
I elicited the data for my (2020) survey in the following manner: The informant was told a story that disambiguates local binding (in which a person P is told about three people, X, Y and Z, such that X loves X, Y doesn’t love Y, and Z doesn’t love Z), and then asked to translate the corresponding sentence (P thinks that only X loves x-self) into their native language so that the translation is true for the story. This was then repeated for the stories and target sentences of the diaphor and pronoun. All data discussed in this paper can be found in the appendices of Middleton (2020): https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10105591/.
Technically, the φ-features c-command p (Middleton 2020), as shown below when the 1st person pronouns of Tok Pisin, Dolakha Newar and Macushí are examined in (5), but as this level of decomposition is not necessary for the analysis of the patterns of syncretism found in pronouns, diaphors and anaphors, I don’t represent it in (2).
This process is cyclic, but the amount of structure that falls into a single cycle can vary; the second half of this paper addresses the size of a cycle for pronominal structures.
I will return to these examples later in the paper.
It would also be possible to posit two phonologically overt allomorphs of p (
, and òun in the presence of d), and have d realised by a phonologically null exponent; both analyses produce the required paradigm.I assume that all pronominals merge with the Case head K when complete.
Thanks to Klaus Abels, Yasu Sudo and Stan Zompì for pointing this problem out to me.
This is simply an extension of underspecification. The English 3\(^{ \text{rd}}\) person feminine accusative and 3\(^{\text{rd}}\) person feminine genitive pronouns are identical: her. This is accounted for in the Distributed Morphology framework by the case features acc and gen not receiving phonological exponence at PF when the pronoun is 3\(^{\text{rd}}\) person feminine. By extension, then, it is perfectly possible that a terminal node hosts a feature or bundle of features, none of which receive a phonological exponent at PF. In other words, there is no rule in Distributed Morphology like (i).
The seven possible realisations of the anaphor do not result in 14 possible ABC and ABA patterns, because two are ABB patterns: when both the diaphor and anaphor are {x y} or {y}.
Exponents that spell out multiple nodes that form a constituent are simply a special type of span.
A reviewer notes that there is the homophony loophole: a true or pseudo-ABA pattern of syncretism could arise if the exponent for [a [d [p]]] or the exponent for a is accidentally homophonous with the exponent for p. Bobaljik 2012 notes the same problem for *ABA suppletion patterns in the adjectival domain, and argues that while the grammar doesn’t exclude this possibility per se, there is a general antihomophony bias in acquisition which accounts for the absence of homophonous exponents (Bobaljik 2012:35).
The alternative would be to conclude that the Aspect node is absent from the verbal tree when the Tense is Future; this would require an impoverishment rule deleting ASP in the context of FUT, which is impossible due to the Russian Doll Deletion Constraint (Ackema and Neeleman 2018); see Example (54) in Sect. 5.
I will focus on the analysis in Bobaljik (2012), because the differences between this analysis and those in Embick (2010) and Moskal (2015) are to do with non-adjacent nodes conditioning suppletion. Since the data being investigated in the present paper concerns syncretism, not suppletion, Bobaljik’s (2012) analysis suffices to represent cyclic analyses more generally.
An impoverishment rule can, of course, apply 100% of the time, which accounts for occasions when impoverishment rules appear to be deterministic.
, and òun in the presence of 
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to Jonathan Bobaljik, Daniel Harbour, Beata Moskal, Ad Neeleman, Stanislao Zompì and two anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments on and discussion of the ideas presented here. All errors are my own.
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Middleton, J. Pseudo-ABA patterns in pronominal morphology. Morphology 31, 329–354 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-021-09377-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-021-09377-7