Derivational timing of morphomes: Morphological rule ordering in the Armenian aorist stem
Hossep Dolatian, Peter Guekguezian
June 2022
 

Cross-linguistically, morphomes are empirically robust but there are few well-studied cases outside of Romance. We analyze the distribution of present and aorist stems in Western Armenian, an understudied Indo-European language. Canonically, the aorist encodes perfective aspect, but it is meaninglessly used in different paradigm cells for different conjugation classes. For these meaningless cases, the aorist stem acts as a morphomic item. The shape of the aorist stem varies across conjugation classes, including regular classes that use a dedicated aorist suffix vs. irregular classes that use root suppletion. This parallelism across the regular and irregular verbs further establishes that the aorist stem is a legitimate morphological item, and not just a set of homophonous items. We formalize the data in Distributed Morphology, a post-syntactic morphological framework. We use head-insertion or node-sprouting to model how the aorist suffix has canonical perfective semantics, but it is meaninglessly inserted by the morphology in non-perfective contexts. We find that the creation of the aorist stem occurs early in the derivation, and it cyclically interacts with allomorphy and morphophonological alternations. In sum, the morphomic aorist is well-integrated into Armenian morphotactics, and morphomic elements interact with other morphological operations. *** Printed title is Derivational timing of morphomes: Canonicity and rule ordering in the Armenian aorist stem
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006241
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Accepted in Morphology
keywords: morphome; stem; aorist; distributed morphology; allomorphy; cyclicity; timing, morphology
previous versions: v2 [May 2022]
v1 [October 2021]
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