The Surrey Syncretisms Database

Baerman, M, Brown, DP and Corbett, GG (2002) The Surrey Syncretisms Database .

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Abstract

Syncretism is a surprising yet widespread and poorly understood phenomenon in natural language. Given a regular distinction such as present versus past, as in English help/helped, work/worked, laugh/laughed, we might not expect to find instances like bid, which can be present or past (we now bid five pounds, though yesterday we bid ten pounds). The form bid, is said to be an instance of syncretism, a single form fulfilling two or more different functions. Thus syncretism is found even in English, whose inflectional morphology (system of different word-forms) is simple in comparison with many languages. The database encodes information on inflectional syncretism in 30 genetically and geographically diverse languages, representing such morphosyntactic features as case, person, number and gender, in all the inflectional classes where they are relevant.

Item Type:	Other
Divisions :	Surrey research (other units)
Authors :	Name Email ORCID Baerman, M m.baerman@surrey.ac.uk Brown, DP Corbett, GG
Date :	2002
Related URLs :	Author
Depositing User :	Symplectic Elements
Date Deposited :	16 May 2017 15:31
Last Modified :	23 Jan 2020 10:40
URI:	http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/id/eprint/820190

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