Classical Armenian declension

This paper looks in detail at the Classical Armenian declension.I argue that the system provides insights into two central issues in this empirical domain: the morphosyntactic structure of the forms which make up a case paradigm, and the fine working of spell-out.On the empirical side, I highlight a connection between case syncretism and its synthetic vs. analytic expression.More specifically, case syncretism in the language is restricted by contiguity in a linear order of cases.In the same ordering, analytic expression of categories gradually replaces synthetic expression.The technology which is proposed to account for this is a core part of nanosyntax (Starke 2005, this volume): fine grained syntax, and phrasal spell-out.Particular attention is devoted to the interaction of the Superset Principle and the "Biggest wins" theorem, two core components of the nanosyntactic spell-out machinery. *This paper is an extension of a chapter in my dissertation, and consequently, there are many people to thank.I mention here only Gillian Ramchand, Michal Starke and Peter Svenonius who commented on a previous version of the material as it appears in this paper.All errors are mine.1 The phrase "non-accidental" in (1) is intended to exclude two sources of homophony: (i) phonological conflation, whereby two distinct underlying forms end up homophonous due to a regular phonological process, and (ii) accidental homophony.Accidental homophony plays no role in this paper; however, one instance of homophony will be later on analyzed as an example of phonological conflation in the sense described above.

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