*ABA in Romeyka Verbal Paradigms

Abstract

In this work, we analyze present-tense and past-tense paradigms in Romeyka, an understudied Indo-European language belonging to the Hellenic sub-branch, spoken mainly in the Trabzon province in Turkey. We argue for decomposing the endings in the plural forms based on the regularities across present and past tense paradigms. While the proposed decomposition is empirically motivated, it leads to a theoretical challenge known in the literature as *ABA pattern, which has been extensively argued to be non-existent in morphology (e.g., Caha, 2009; Bobaljik, 2012; Middleton, 2020). We demonstrate this challenge for Nanosyntax (Starke, 2009), which predicts that syncretism will only be possible for structurally contiguous features. In an attempt to address this puzzle, we develop an account which relies on the idea that languages may differ in whether they single out the Speaker or the Addressee features in building first and second-person structures. Accordingly, the *ABA in Romeyka dissolves into a predicted pattern where the syncretism is the non-offending AAB pattern.