The complexity of syncretism patterns in inflectional class systems

While the morphological phenomena of syncretism and inflection classes have been extensively studied separately, their interaction remains underexplored. Here I present a typology, and a cross-linguistic exploration, of the diversity of morphological syncretism patterns and their complexity in inflectional paradigms. I propose several easy-to-obtain measures of syncretism complexity and I analyze a sample of both related and unrelated inflectional systems to find out about two seemingly incompatible types of syncretism complexity in the world’s languages.