Publication details
Realizational Morphology and Pieces of Inflection
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In languages with rich nominal inflection, such as Russian or Latin, nouns fall into declension classes in function of the sets of exponents they take. Unlike genders, declension classes do not have any syntactic effect, although they might also determine allomorphy in derivation. In this intermediate-level course we will highlight the general architectural properties of two realizational morphological frameworks, Nanosyntax and Distributed Morphology, and apply them to the system of Russian nominal declension. Three main issues will be addressed: Why are there declension classes? Can the declension class be made to follow from independent properties of a noun or is it a diacritic feature? How is it determined how many declension classes a concrete language has? How are they constrained? What should be treated as allomorphy/suppletion and what, as a declension class? Do number, gender, and case form intermediate constituents (portmanteaus)? What is the general status of complex affixes in morphological theory and how are they interpreted? What are the concrete principles determining the realization of a given cell in the paradigm for each declension class? Which cells are (systematically) syncretic? Is impoverishment and other morphology-specific operations a necessary feature of realizational frameworks? More generally, is a direct translation from syntax to phonological form possible without an intermediate layer of a dedicated morphological structure, with its own rules and representations? |
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