The Morphophonology of Russian Adjectival Inflection

Abstract

In this article, we present the morphosyntactic structure underlying the Russian adjectival declension and the phonological rules that apply to it to derive the surface representations. We describe the two declension classes of Russian adjectives and argue that adjectives and nouns employ the same theme suffixes (-oj- and -o-) and, importantly, that choice of theme suffix also determines choice of Case exponents. On this view, there is no special adjectival declension class; instead, Case exponents are shared between adjectives and nouns, and the choice of a “paradigm” is determined by the choice of the theme suffix. The article covers all adjectival inflections, including those of the possessives, demonstratives, interrogatives, and paucal numerals.