Conflict in Russian Genitive Plural Assignment: A Solution Represented in DATR

Abstract

Inflectional endings are assigned in languages by general principles, but these can come into conflict. We address the question of how such conflict is resolved. A particularly complex example is the Russian genitive plural, where we find that with soft-stem nouns there is a conflict between exponent assignment according to declension class and a default exponent assignment for soft-stem nouns. What is specially interesting is that the conflict here can be resolved by reference to subsystems over and above the paradigm, such as stress. We present an explicit account of the conflict and its mediation by basing our study on default inheritance. For this purpose we make use of the lexical knowledge representation language DATR. This allows us to demonstrate in the output provided that the correct forms are indeed predicted by our theory.

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