Some cases of the interplay between semantics and plural inflection in the Armenian dialect of Kʽesab

The relationship between semantics and nominal inflection in the history of Armenian represents a topic scantly explored thus far The aim of this article is to propose some data and reflections about this relationship with reference to the dialect of Kʽesab, still spoken in northwestern Syria In the majority of Armenian dialects, as well as in Classical Armenian, inflectional classes are governed by form rules; consequently, a noun’s inflectional pattern can be considered an index of some formal feature possessed by the lexeme In the Armenian diasystem, cases in which the noun inflectional pattern is selected on the ground of lexical semantics, becoming an index of some semantic feature of the noun, are in general rare However, some Armenian dialects display an increased role played by lexical semantics in assigning nouns to inflectional classes This is especially true for those dialects that admit many different ways to form the plural of nouns The dialect of Kʽesab, a probable continuation of Cilician Middle Armenian, allows us to observe such usually uncommon phenomenon, perhaps in a better way and to a larger extent than any other Armenian dialect can do.