Speaker: Nikita Bezrukov (MIT)
Title: Building New Plurals from Old Morphology: Evidence from Armenian
Time: Thursday, October 22nd, 5pm – 6pm
Location: 32-D769
Abstract: Modern Armenian has two major productive plural suffixes, -er with monosyllabic stems and -ner with polysyllabic stems. These are commonly thought to be historically related, with -ner developing from an earlier sequence -ni-er. I use cross-dialectal evidence, especially from the VanShatakh area, to support this reconstruction and then ask how such a change should be modeled formally. Building on Diertani 2011, Alexiadou 2021, and Dali & Mathieu 2021, I treat the development as restructuring of Vocabulary Items over a largely stable nominal structure, involving affix migration, recutting, and changes in the distribution of competing plural exponents.