An apparent case of outwardly-sensitive allomorphy in the Armenian definite

Abstract

Cross-linguistically, it is rare to find cases of phonologically-conditioned allomorphy where the trigger morpheme lies external to the target morpheme. At first sight, the Armenian definite suffix seems to be such a case. The definite suffix uses various surface forms. The choice of surface form is conditioned by the preceding segment, the following clitic, and/or the following word. However, we argue that this outward sensitivity is epiphenomenal and not actual allomorphy. We derive the surface forms by using an abstract underlying representation that uses floating segments or ghost segments. These segments go through rigid cycles of spell-out and phonological strata. Constraint re-rankings of autosegmental docking, phrasal resyllabification, and cluster avoidance explain a range of dialectal variation. In sum, the Armenian definite suffix is one case of an apparent case of outwardly-sensitive allomorphy that is reducible to latent segments.

Mutation, allomorphy and Galician clitics

“…The problem with this analysis is that it involves outward-looking phonologically conditioned allomorphy: the allomorph depends on the phonological form of an element higher up in the structure. Under standard assumptions, such sensitivity should not exist (Carstairs 1990, Bobaljik 2000; cases where it has been argued to exist are often amenable to alternative explanations (Deal & Wolf 2017, Kalin 2020, Kiparsky 2021, Dolatian 2022. Galician could've presented a new argument for the existence of outward-looking phonological allomorphy, if that hadn't been inconsistent with the prosodic considerations presented earlier.…”

Large Language Models and Low-Resource Languages: An Examination of Armenian NLP

“…The development of NLP resources for underdocumented languages like Armenian has seen noteworthy progress in morphological and syntactic analysis, as highlighted by several key studies (Dolatian et al, 2022;Kindt and Kepeklian, 2022;Vidal-Gorène and Kindt, 2020;Ghukasyan and Avetisyan, 2021;Arkhangelskiy et al, 2012;Chiarcos et al, 2018).…”

“…Morphological Analysis: A wide spectrum of tools has been developed, including a morphological transducer by Dolatian et al (2022) for Western Armenian, and a reusable RNN model by for various Armenian dialects. The latter indicates the possibility of rapid corpus processing in languages with limited NLP resources.…”

The stratal structure of Kuria morphological tone

“…Arguments to the same effect for Bantu verbal tone are found in Hyman & Ngunga (1994) for Yao and Odden (1996) for Kimatuumbi. More recent applications in a cyclic/stratal architecture employing OT are found (in tonal and segmental phonology) in Bermúdez-Otero (2018a), Rolle (2018) on Kunama, Paschen (2018) on Fox and Seereer Sin, Jaker & Kiparsky (2020) on Tetsǫ´t’ıné and Dolatian (2022) on Armenian.…”