explaining the structure of case paradigms by the mechanisms of nanosyntax

this paper looks in detail at the classical armenian nominal declension. i highlight several generalizations that can be read off the surface paradigms, including restrictions on syncretism, fusional vs. agglutinative expression of categories and the emergence of unexpected thematic vowels. subsequently, i explain these generalizations within the framework of nanosyntax (starke 2009, 2011). the defining features of the account are fine-grained syntactic representation (a single feature per syntactic terminal) and phrasal spell-out. i argue that these two tools allow us to replace a separate level of morphological (paradigm specific) structure by a syntactic tree.