12h00
en ligne
Russian nominal declension is usually claimed to involve three or four morphological classes, whose nature is subject to some debate. Recent proposals (Nesset 1994, Alexiadou and Müller 2008, Caha 2021, and Privizentseva 2023) have attempted to reduce Corbett’s (1982) four declension classes to two formal features, one of which is gender ([±F]), yet the other has not been given independent explanation. Also no progress has been made in the question of why some nouns are indeclinable (an open and productive class in Russian). In this talk I will propose a phonologically driven account of the distinction between declinable and indeclinable nominal stems: while the latter (except for female-denoting consonant-final stems) end in a full vowel, the former end either in a consonant or in a floating segment. I will show that floating segments explain how indeclinable nouns become declinable, permit for a natural explanation of both heteroclite nouns and the unproductive nature of the “third declension”, and also make possible full unification of [+F] case endings.