Number Marking Mismatches in Modern Armenian: A Distributed Morphology Approach

This thesis presents a Distributed Morphology analysis of nominal inflection in Modern Armenian, focusing on systematic mismatches between abstract morphosyntactic information and surface exponence. Two domains are examined. First, Modern Armenian exhibits systematic double case marking in both singular and plural paradigms in non-productive classes. I analyze this pattern as resulting from the fission and independent spell-out of decomposed case features, comparable to oblique-stem marking in Northeast Caucasian languages. Second, synthetic possessive constructions show cross-dialectal variation in number marking. Some varieties display morphomic plural doubling in singular possessees, while others lack any co-occurrence of two plural markers on the surface, even when it's motivated by the underlying structure. I argue that the latter pattern arises through haplology applied to an underlying doubling structure, yielding Duke-of-York derivations and motivating a distinction between pre- and post-Vocabulary Insertion deletion.The analysis integrates dialectal evidence largely absent from prior theoretical work and shows that Armenian nominal morphology provides direct empirical support for feature decomposition, fission, post-Vocabulary Insertion haplology, and Duke-of-York gambits within a realizational framework.