Open AccessAgglutination underlies superficial fusion in Western Armenian verbal inflection
Author(s) -
Ayla Karakaş,
Hossep Dolatian,
Peter Ara Guekguezian
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
proceedings of the workshop on turkic and languages in contact with turkic
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2641-3485
DOI - 10.3765/ptu.v6i1.5056
Subject(s) - inflection , agglutinative language , armenian , linguistics , allomorph , subject (documents) , diminutive , computer science , artificial intelligence , history , past tense , future tense , natural language processing , verb , psychology , philosophy , parsing , morpheme , library science
Verbs in Western Armenian (Indo-European) inflect for both subject agreement and tense. Subject and tense marking is often fused, which makes segmentation difficult. We show that, despite surface fusion, verbal inflection in Western Armenian is fundamentally agglutinative. By segmenting subject and tense suffixes across the verbal paradigm, we capture syncretic patterns and other interactions between inflectional slots that a fusional account does not. Our analysis requires limited but systematic use of zero morphs. Our agglutinative model of Western Armenian verbs reveals that inwardly-sensitive morphologically-conditioned allomorphy has priority over its outwardly-sensitive counterpart.