A revised version of my MA thesis on nominal inflection in Modern Armenian is now available on OSF.
The update includes systematic proofreading and stylistic revisions aimed at improving readability, while preserving the original empirical and theoretical content. The thesis develops a Distributed Morphology analysis of Armenian nominal inflection, with particular focus on systematic mismatches between morphosyntactic structure and surface exponence.
Abstract
This thesis presents a Distributed Morphology analysis of nominal inflection in Modern Armenian, focusing on systematic mismatches between abstract morphosyntactic information and surface exponence. Two domains are examined. First, Modern Armenian exhibits systematic double case marking in both singular and plural paradigms in non-productive inflectional classes. I analyze this pattern as the result of fission and independent spell-out of decomposed case features, comparable to oblique-stem marking in Northeast Caucasian languages.
Second, synthetic possessive constructions show cross-dialectal variation in number marking. Some varieties display morphomic plural doubling with singular possessees, while others systematically avoid surface co-occurrence of two plural markers even when such doubling is motivated by the underlying structure. I argue that the latter pattern results from haplology applied to an underlying doubling configuration, yielding Duke-of-York derivations and motivating a distinction between pre- and post-Vocabulary Insertion deletion.
The analysis integrates dialectal evidence largely absent from prior theoretical work and shows that Armenian nominal morphology provides direct empirical support for feature decomposition, fission, post-Vocabulary Insertion haplology, and Duke-of-York effects within a realizational framework.
Citation
Bezrukov, N. (2016). Number marking mismatches in Modern Armenian: A Distributed Morphology approach. MA thesis, University of Chicago. https://doi.org/10.31237/osf.io/5zx7k_v1