[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

Pertsova (2005, henceforth P) describes defectivity in the genitive plural (henceforth, gen.pl.) of Russian nouns. This defectivity is not quite as extensive as in the verbs: Zaliznyak’s (1977) renowned morphological dictionary, Pertsova’s primary source, labels roughly forty noun lexemes as Р.мн. затрудн. ‘gen.pl. difficult’ (P gives this as ‘awkward’), and a smaller number are labeled Р.мн. нет ‘gen.pl. does not exist’. Pre-theoretically, the Russian gen.pl. form has three complexities. First, there are three (surface) gen.pl. suffixes: -ej, -ov, and a null -∅ (though this is often taken to be the surface form of a back yer; e.g., Bailyn & Nevins 2008). Secondly, stress may either fall on the stem or the desinence, depending on a number of factors. First, the fleeting vowels found in many Slavic languages, sometimes surface in the final syllable of the stem of null gen.pl. forms; e.g., kiška ‘gut’ has a gen.pl kišok.

Let us consider the ‘do not exist’ cases first. A few examples are dno ‘bottom’, mgla ‘haze’, and mzda, an archaic word meaning ‘bribe’. All three of these are built from stems consisting solely of consonants—the -o and -a are nom.sg. affixes—and according to P, we would expect them to form a null gen.pl.¹ Were they do so, then, the gen.pl. form would be a purely consonantal sequence (*dn, *mgl, *mzd, etc.). While Russian allows quite rich onsets, it does not permit vowel-less prosodic words. So, presumably, these ‘do not exist’ cases are in some sense derived, but are unpronounceable.

The cases labeled by Zaliznyak as ‘difficult’ are perhaps more challenging. These include fata ‘veil’, yula ‘weasel’, and suma ‘bag, pouch’. Many of these (e.g., čalma ‘turban’, taxta ‘ottoman’, mulla ‘mullah’) are borrowings from Tatar or other Turkic languages. All forty ‘difficult’ nouns are all feminines in -a, and all of them have desinential stress (i.e., stress on the case/number suffix) throughout. According to P, these ‘difficult’ nouns would all have a null gen.pl. were it not ineffable. This means that stem stress is the only option (because duh, there’s no way to stress a null desinence). Yet speakers are reluctant to introduce a new, stem-stressed allomorph of the stem that does not otherwise exhibit stem stress, because of a principle known as lexical conservatism.

I follow this basic logic, but I am not sure how to make the lexical conservatism filter into something mechanistic and appropriately parameterized so that it can actually predict the data we observe. P points out that there are other nouns which have exactly the same properties (null gen.pl., desinential stress) but resolve this conflict by retracting stress to the final syllable of the stem. For example, borodá ‘beard’ has a null, stem-stressed, but unobjectionable gen.pl. boród, as does the previously mentioned kišká/kišók.² After considering and rejecting an appeal to frequency, P suggests that there is something special about monosyllabic stems that makes them more resistent to stem allomorphy. The problems do not end here, because as P gamely points out, the gen.pl. is not the only case/number combination which forces stress retraction; it also happens in the null nom.sg. of masculines like stol ‘table’, but I am aware of any Russian nouns which are defective in the nom.sg.

While I find P’s description clear, I do not think her analysis works. It correctly identifies two interesting explananda—the fact that gaps are localized to monosyllabic stems, and to the genitive plurals—but gives little explanation for these facts. And the invocation of lexical conservatism, never that well-defined in the first place, has done little to help; it could just as well be that the conflict between desinential stress and the selection of a null gen.pl. produces ineffability. Lexical conservatism actually prevents us from uniting the ‘does not exist’ and the ‘difficult’ cases, which after all both involve monosyllabic stems expected to exhibit desinential stress and a null gen.pl.³

Sims (2015) notes that these defective nouns might be an interesting case for studying the interaction between defectivity and syncretism, a topic first discussed by Stump (2010). In Russian there is syncretism between gen.pl. and accusative plural (acc.pl.) forms for all animate nouns. Since twelve of the defective nouns are animates, this  means that either there is an exception to this syncretism (in the case that the acc.pl. is acceptable) or perhaps, the defectivity itself is carried over by the syncretism and nouns are defective in the acc.pl. too. No one seems to have gathered the relevant judgments  about the well-formedness of these animates in their gen.pl. vs. acc.pl. forms yet.

Postscript

As is also the case for Russian verbs, defectivity in Russian nouns has arguably risen to the level of conscious awareness among Russophones. In his short story Kocherga, the Soviet humorist Mikhail Zoshchenko tells of workers who wish to order five more fire pokers for their drafty office. The nom.sg. kocherga ‘fire poker’, is unobjectionable, but no one they talk to is sure what the gen.pl., the case used for five or more of an object in a quantified noun phrase like ‘five fire pokers’, ought to be, and both they and their interlocutors use clever circumlocutions to dodge the question.

Endnotes

1. I note that Wiktionary gives the gen.pl. of dno as don’ev, with a back stem yer  surfacing (also bearing stress) and the -ev gen.pl. suffix. If this is correct, this is a problem for P’s claim that stems of this class are expected to have a null gen.pl., unless there is some other reason dno to behaves differently than mgla or mzda.
2. Here I am using acute accents to indicate stress, as is common practice in (anglophone) Russian linguistics.
3. I am loathe to assign grammatical distinctions to informal gradations of unacceptability, so I see no incentive to distinguish these cases.

References

Bailyn, J. F. and Nevins, A. 2008. Russian genitive plurals are impostors. In A. Bachrach and A. Nevins (ed.), Inflectional Identity, pages 237-270. Oxford University Press.
Pertsova, K. 2005. How lexical conservatism can lead to paradigm gaps. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 11: 13-30.
Sims, A. 2015. Inflectional Defectiveness. Cambridge University Press.
Stump, G. 2010. Interactions between defectiveness and syncretism. In M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett, and D. Brown (ed.), Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us, pages 181-210. Oxford University Press.
Zaliznyak, A. A. 1977. Grammatičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka. Moskva.