7 - The noun (phrase): agreement, case and definiteness in an Albanian variety

Summary

This chapter considers nominal inflections in Albanian, a language with case morphology. We argue that the deepest layer of inflection in Albanian nouns (including the predicative lexical base and the nominal class vowel) is more or less comparable to the inflection of Romance nouns. Above this layer, Albanian nouns add what is descriptively a case ending; we analyse it as an inflection specialized for the satisfaction of properties of the superordinate structure (nominative for the EPP argument, accusative for the internal argument etc.), as discussed in section 7.2.

In the minimalist work of Chomsky (1995) and in its morphological implementation in Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993), case and phi-features are functional properties, interpretable at best on a subset of lexical heads, and as such triggering feature-checking operations – as well as undergoing morphological rules and providing some of the key arguments in favour of Late Insertion. Here, on the contrary, we reduce case and phi-inflections to elements legible at the LF interface, and more precisely to arguments. Agreement between such inflections means that the arguments they represent form chains. Our crucial motivation is that abandoning schematic ideas about the division of labour between syntax and morphology and between functional and lexical categories (features) makes it easier to account for the finer articulation of the data and their variation.

A particular point of interest as regards Albanian is that nominal inflections display not only agreement and case properties, but also definiteness properties. In Balkan linguistics (cf. also the discussion of Romanian in chapter 8), definite inflections are often (though not always) treated as postposed articles.