Is inflectional syncretism ever “systematic”? Some comments on Caha (2019)

Since Plank (1991), syncretic patterns in inflectional paradigms have been studied in a sustained way, fuelled also by the increasing popularity of Distributed Morphology (e.g. Siddiqi 2019) and nanosyntax (Caha 2009; Baunaz et al. 2018). Consider a German inflectional paradigm such as the following: Many linguists would say that the first and third person plural here have a (systematically) syncretic form (-en), while the -t suffix of the 3SG and the the -t suffix of the 2nd person plural a...