Relativized Locality: Phases and Tiers in Long-Distance Allomorphy in Armenian

Abstract

Linguistic processes tend to respect locality constraints. In this article, we analyze the distribution of conjugation classes in Armenian verbs. We analyze a type of tense allomorphy that applies across these classes. We show that on the surface, this allomorphy is long-distance. Specifically, it is sensitive to the interaction of multiple morphemes that are neither linearly nor structurally adjacent. However, we argue that this allomorphy respects “relativized adjacency” (Toosarvandani 2016) or tier-based locality (Aksënova, Graf, and Moradi 2016). While not surface-local, the interaction in Armenian verbs is local on a tier projected from morphological features. This formal property of tier-based locality is substantively manifested as phase-based locality in Armenian (cf. Marvin 2002). In addition to being well-studied computationally, tier-based locality allows us to capture superficially nonlocal morphological processes while respecting the crosslinguistic tendency of locality. We speculate that tier-based locality is a crosslinguistic tendency in long-distance allomorphy, while phase-based locality is not necessarily so.