Typology of Noun Inflectional Synthesis

The present project has concentrated on surveying noun complexity. As the notion of complexity, absolute complexity of noun structure is used, measured as the number of inflectional categories of the noun in a language. Targeted inflectional nominal categories are case, number, gender, possession, animacy, alienability, definiteness, argument indexation and TAM (tense, aspect, mood). A database module has been created containing information about 105 languages covering different geographical regions. I have argued that correlations within noun inflectional structure exist: absence of the number category implicates low synthesis level while presence of inflection for tense, aspect, mood categories is involved in high level of synthesis. Furthermore, evidences for complementary distribution of case and possession have been provided: firstly, there is asymmetrical spreading of them across Eurasia and America; secondly, they are connected through interaction with alienability which is negatively correlated with case but positively correlated with possession. I addressed the hypothesis of complexity trade-off in the context of noun versus verb inflectional complexity. Intuitively, one would expect a negative correlation between them but Kendall’s correlation test shows the opposite. Still, this puzzling finding is important since these measures can be used independently for further typological research. Another valuable outcome of the project is that the collected data provides some basic groundwork for a potential larger project on noun phrase structure and configurationality.