Explaining the structure of case paradigms by the mechanisms of Nanosyntax; The Classical Armenian nominal declension

摘要

This paper looks in detail at the Classical Armenian nominal declension. I highlight several generalizations that can be read off the surface paradigms, including restrictions on syncretism, fusional vs. agglutinative expression of categories and the emergence of unexpected thematic vowels. Subsequently, I explain these generalizations within the framework of Nanosyntax (Starke 2009, 2011). The defining features of the account are fine-grained syntactic representation (a single feature per syntactic terminal) and phrasal spell-out. I argue that these two tools allow us to replace a separate level of morphological (paradigm specific) structure by a syntactic tree.