Interaction of morphological and phonological markedness in Russian genitive plural allomorphy

Abstract

This paper incorporates morphological markedness constraints into a framework in which morphology and phonology directly interact, modeled with interleaving of morphological and phonological constraints in serial OT (Wolf 2008, 2009). Morphological markedness constraints are constraints against realization (or spell-out) of morphologically marked feature sets. The empirical data motivating this proposal mainly come from the case-study of Russian genitive plural allomorphy, which is analyzed as involving tradeoffs between morphological markedness and other constraints in the grammar, including the purely phonological ones. This proposal explains the otherwise apparently arbitrary and unnatural transderivational dependency between the nominative singular and the genitive plural in Russian. Additionally, this account of the genitive plural allomorphy provides a unified explanation for several seemingly exceptional sub-generalizations which upon examining lexical statistics turn out to be regular. Implications and predictions of an interleaved model with morphological markedness constraints are discussed throughout the article.