Explorations in Nominal Inflection

Book excerpt: Explorations in Nominal Inflection is a collection of new articles that focus on nominal inflection markers in different languages. The studies are concerned with the morphological inventories of markers, their syntactic distribution, and, importantly, the interaction between the two. As a result, the contributions shed new light on the morphology/syntax interface, and on the role of morpho-syntactic features in mediating between the two components. Issues that feature prominently throughout are inflection class, case, gender, number, animacy, syncretism, iconicity, agreement, the status of paradigms, the nature of morpho-syntactic features, and the structure of nominal projections. Recurrent analytical tools involve the concepts of competition (optimality, specificity), underspecification, and economy, in various theoretical frameworks. James P. Blevins: Inflection Classes and Economy Bernd Wiese: Categories and Paradigms. On Underspecification in Russian Declension