Slavic Morphology: Recent Approaches to Classic Problems, Illustrated with Russian

Abstract:This state-of-the-field article traces some recent trajectories of morphological theory, illustrated via four classic problems of Slavic morphology: vowel-zero alternation, stem consonant mutations, paradigmatic gaps, and animacy-determined accusative syncretism. Using Russian as the primary illustrating data, one theme that emerges is that theories that leverage the distributional properties of the lexicon have made progress against previously intractable aspects of these phenomena, including idiosyncratic lexical distributions, unexpected (non)productivity, and distributions shared by distinct exponents. In turn, the analyses raise new questions.