Syncretism, Impoverishment, and the Structure of Person Features 1

Syncretism between 1sg and 3sg verb forms outside the present tense is ubiquitous in the Germanic languages. The primary purpose of this paper is to show that this syncretism gives evidence that syncretism is a natural consequence of a less than faithful syntax-morphophonology interface. Secondarily, the syncretism will be used to support the idea that the person system is organized around a pair of binary features, not the commonly assumed trivalent feature.