Agglutination underlies superficial fusion in Western Armenian verbal inflection

Ayla Karakaş,Peter Guekguezian,Hossep Dolatian

doi:10.3765/ptu.v6i1.5056

Abstract

Verbs in Western Armenian (Indo-European) inflect for both subject agreement and tense. Subject and tense marking is often fused, which makes segmentation difficult. We show that, despite surface fusion, verbal inflection in Western Armenian is fundamentally agglutinative. By segmenting subject and tense suffixes across the verbal paradigm, we capture syncretic patterns and other interactions between inflectional slots that a fusional account does not. Our analysis requires limited but systematic use of zero morphs. Our agglutinative model of Western Armenian verbs reveals that inwardly-sensitive morphologically-conditioned allomorphy has priority over its outwardly-sensitive counterpart.

Highlights

Western Armenian is an understudied Indo-European language that has undergone almost a millennium of contact with speakers of Turkish
Reflecting its history, Western Armenian verbal morphology combines an Indo-European fusional structure with elements of Turkic agglutinative patterns (Adjarian 1909; Donabedian 2018)
Using the conventions of Distributed Morphology (DM), we propose a segmentation of tense and agreement which highlights an underlying agglutinative morphology – one that is able to capture syncretic patterns and other interactions between inflectional slots

Summary

Introduction

The YESZERO analysis captures both the syncretism and the interaction of T and Agr. First, we need a rule of exponing T as a zero morph in the past 3SG. The above rules correctly block the syncretism, license the zeros, and capture the elsewhere status of the E-Class past perfective This is all thanks to the use of zero morphs. For the NOZERO analysis, the rules so far (17) predict that the T-Agr slots of the E-Class past perfective are exponed by a fused -r. The set of realization rules for past T for the NOZERO (27) analysis are more convoluted than for the YESZERO analysis (25) All of these problems arise from the varied use of zero exponents in the 3SG

Discussion

Conclusion