concord, agreement and suppletion

[Ora Matushansky]

Dear Rolf,

Thanks very much for your answer - it does suggest that the generalization
is valid. There are however some problems defining "declension class" this way:
(a)	it makes the prediction that gender and declension class cannot
co-exist (since the only difference between them is whether they spread or
not) - this prediction is wrong (cf. Latin, Russian...)
(b)	it lumps declension class together with other accidentally
non-spreading features, e.g. gender in English. Conversely, if you say that
gender features may not spread, then it becomes impossible to know whether
a particular noun class distinction (in a language with Case) is gender or
declension class
(c)	it ignores the fact that declension class has no semantic correlation
(even though gender is often arbitrary, it quite often connects to genuine
"real-world" distinctions).
(d)	(perhaps as a subpart of (c)), declension class cannot be overridden:
e.g. masculine nouns denoting humans can be treated as feminine (cf. la
mEdico in European Spanish, moja vrach 'my-F doctor-M' in Russian), but I
don't think it's ever possible to put a noun in a different declension
class (unless such a switch is entailed by the switch in natural gender)
(e)	my guess is that genders cannot be unproductive, while declension and
conjugation classes can - but I don't know enough about languages with
(agreeing) noun classes to be sure.

I don't have a precise definition in mind, but my impression is that a
declension class is so much more a property of a noun stem that it may be
likened to the verbal theme suffixes... though these latter can be used to
signal a switch to subjunctive in Spanish...

O
Ora Matushansky

CNRS - UMR 7023 (Paris 8)
email: matushan at noos.fr
page web: http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/