‘Always been Christian’: Mythic Conflation among the Oksapmin of Papua New Guinea

Across the world and throughout history, people have negotiated religious and social change by marshalling the mythological resources at their disposal. In cases of conversion to Christianity, this dynamic has often taken the form of constructing an isomorphism between traditional mythical narratives and those learned from the Bible, a manifestation of the process I here call ‘mythic conflation’. In this article I explore how the Oksapmin of the West Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, have conflated aspects of Bible stories with two of their traditional narratives in an attempt to overcome cosmological contradiction. From the etic perspective, this has partially collapsed difference in the construction of syncretic religious forms. From the emic perspective, by constructing for themselves an ancestral precedent of this kind, the Oksapmin support a claim of having revealed the mystery of Christianity's local origin.     

On homophony and methodology in morphology

An analysis of the Afro-Asiatic prefixal conjugation is presented, arguing that the prefixal t of second and some third persons comprises two distinct morphemes. The claim is supported by intralinguistic evidence, from other verbal and non-verbal forms, and historical/comparative evidence, that has not generally been considered in this context before. The results highlight several methodological and conceptual issues in morphological theory, including the status of homophones, paradigms, and diachronic development.     

Syncretism in Dutch dialects

Dutch dialects show an enormous amount of variation with respect to the verbal inflectional paradigm. To wit, some dialects only have two forms in the present tense indicative to express all persons in singular and plural, whereas other dialects use three or even four different forms to do so. inflectional pattern is equally likely to occur; some patterns are found nowhere, whereas others are geographically widespread and stable over time. We will show that these recurring patterns of syncretism are also typologically well-attested. The recurring pattern involves neutralization of a morphosyntactic distinction in the marked half of the paradigm. More specifically, we see that plural and past tense are neutralizing contexts. We will show that a grammar that solely uses underspecification of affixes to account for the observed syncretisms, misses a generalization that can only be expressed by impoverishment rules or some paradigmatic means.     

The typology of syncretisms and the status of feature structure. Verbal paradigms across 355 Dutch dialects

In this article syncretic patterning in the present indicative paradigm of the verb kloppen (‘to knock’) is described for 355 Dutch dialects taken from the morphological atlas of Dutch dialects (Van den Berg 2003). Following Baerman et al. (2005, The syntax-morphology interface. A study of syncretism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), I distinguish syncretisms driven by (universal) feature structure and language specific sources of syncretism. I present independent evidence for the role of phonology, pragmatics and amplification in the formation of syncretic patterns of Dutch. The benefit of the study of the interaction between language specific routes to syncretism and feature structure is threefold. We know language specific routes to syncretism can obscure feature structure. By distinguishing the different routes to syncretism we canalsorevealthe strength of feature structure. Secondly, distinguishing sources of syncretisms enables us to understand similarities and differences in the cross-linguistic patterning of syncretisms. Thirdly, we can link typological data to language acquisition patterns.     

Notes on paradigm economy

It is shown that assuming instances of syncretism to be systematic in the unmarked case may significantly reduce the number of possible inflection classes that can be generated on the basis of a given inventory of markers, without recourse to specific constraints like Carstairs’ (Allomorphy in Inflection, Croom Helm 1987) Paradigm Economy Principle or Carstairs-McCarthy’s (Language 70:737–787, 1994) No Blur Principle. If there is always one radically underspecified (i.e., elsewhere) marker per morphological domain, and if there is always one unique marker that is chosen in cases of marker competition, it turns out that there can be at most 2 ⁿ  − 1 inflection classes for n markers, independently of the number of instantiations of the grammatical category that the markers have to distribute over. The argument relies on the notion of marker deactivation combinations.     

Greek dialectal evidence for the role of the paradigm in inflectional change

Several dialectal variants of the inflectional ending for person, number, tense, and voice in the Modern Greek past imperfective nonactive paradigm are presented here by way of showing the relevance of dialect material for linguistic theory. In this case, the endings underwent reshapings based on other related endings (e.g., 3PL based on 1/2PL), providing a basis for understanding the nature of interactions among different “cells” within a paradigm and the constructs that can be employed to model them. As a result, both rules of referral and O–O correspondence relations are shown to have to take sub-word similarities into consideration, and various constraints on such interactions are considered and rejected in favor of a liberal view that allows for any cell to relate to any other cell. Finally, a distinction is motivated, based on cell-to-cell influences, between adventitious and significant syncretism of form.