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The role of case syncretism in sentence processing
In many languages that have morphological case, syncretism is found: some affixes are used for different cases inside one paradigm (intra-paradigmatic syncretism) or across paradigms (trans-paradigmatic syncretism). Intra-paradigmatic syncretism results in morphologically ambiguous, or syncretic, forms: e.g. the form stoly from the noun stol ‘table’ is used both in nominative and in accusative plural. The affix -y is used in nominative and accusative plural, as well as in genitive singular in the nouns from other inflectional classes (e.g. rozy from roza ‘rose’), which gives us an example of trans-paradigmatic syncretism.
This chapter focuses on the role of syncretism in processing, synthesizing the data from several experimental studies on Russian that I conducted with my coauthors. Many effects discussed below have been observed in Russian for the first time and are interesting and unexpected both for theoretical morphology and for psycholinguistic models. In section 1.1, I discuss the relevant features of the Russian nominal and adjectival inflection. In section 1.2, I introduce the previous experimental studies in which case syncretism played a role. In section 1.3, our experimental studies are briefly outlined, highlighting the main questions addressed in this chapter.