The main goal of this article is to outline a new approach to syncretism in optimality theory, one that does not rely on tools like underspecification or rules of referral that are taken over from grammatical theories which do not recognize constraint ranking and constraint violability. The analysis is based on a concept of morphological exponents as leading forms. Instances of syncretism can be traced back to the selection of unfaithful leading forms as a last resort to avoid paradigmatic gaps: The minimally unfaithful leading form exponent spreads to an empty paradigm cell. Three well-studied empirical domains figure in the analysis: (i) determiner inflection in German (Bierwisch (1967), Wiese (1999)), (ii) Italian object clitics (Grimshaw (2001)), and (iii) animacy effects with noun inflection in Russian (Wunderlich (2004)). 1. Syncretism by Underspecification Underspecification of morphological exponents (inflection markers) with respect to morpho-syntactic features is proposed as a general method to account for instances of syncretism (systematic homonymy) in morphological paradigms in Jakobson (1962a;b). This method is formally refined and extended in Bierwisch (1967). Underspecification is adopted as a means to derive syncretism in a variety of contemporary morphological theories, such

The main goal of this article is to outline a new approach to syncretism in optimality theory, one that does not rely on tools like underspecification or rules of referral that are taken over from grammatical theories which do not recognize constraint ranking and constraint violability. The analysis is based on a concept of morphological exponents as leading forms. Instances of syncretism can be traced back to the selection of unfaithful leading forms as a last resort to avoid paradigmatic gaps: The minimally unfaithful leading form exponent spreads to an empty paradigm cell. Three well-studied empirical domains figure in the analysis: (i) determiner inflection in German (Bierwisch (1967), Wiese (1999)), (ii) Italian object clitics (Grimshaw (2001)), and (iii) animacy effects with noun inflection in Russian