THE GEOMETRY OF RUSSIAN INFLECTION: ON TRADITIONAL AND NON-TRADITIONAL DECLENSION TABLES

Abstract

The paper discusses a number of theoretical issues related to Russian inflection from a rather technical perspective of building an optimal table for Russian nominal declension. These issues can be divided into three groups. The first group includes the hierarchy of case grams, as well as the order of cases in the table (implied by this hierarchy). The second group includes the inventory of declension classes (determined by allomorphic variation within the markers of one and the same gram), as well as the strategies of representing this allomorphic variation in inflectional paradigms. Finally, the third group includes the status of partitive (or “second genitive”) and adnumerative (or “counting form”) in the system of Russian declension; this latter problem has received relatively less attention, but it is closely related to the previous two groups.