2.1 Case marking

In this subsection, I describe the morphophonology of the Ossetic markers in some detail. The upshot of the discussion is that the case marking is nearly agglutinative for nouns and is based on several stems for pronouns.

In a DP, the case and number are only marked on the head noun, no overt agreement of any kind exists (10). Case suffixes only undergo little morphonological variation and attach directly to the stem (10a), only preceded by the plural marker (10b). A peculiar behavior of DPs with numerals will be addressed in Section 7.1: for the time being, it is not important for our discussion.

The case inventory of Ossetic comprises the nominative, accusative, genitive,⁴ dative, ablative/instrumental, allative, superessive, inessive, and equative. Traditional descriptions of Iron Ossetic also list the comitative case, which probably should be analyzed as a postposition. In this subsection, I provide some typical paradigms; see Axvlediani (1963); Abaev (1964); Isaev (1966); and Takazov (2009) for more data.

The behavior of stems is different in nouns and in pronouns. For nouns, changes in the stem that can be triggered by a case suffix are minimal, whereas for pronouns, two or three different stems occur in case forms.

For nouns, the shape of case suffixes depends on whether the stem ends in a consonant, as illustrated for Iron and Digor bɐχ ‘horse’ in Tables 1 and 2, in a vowel other than ɐ, as illustrated for Iron gɐdǝ ‘cat’ in Table 1 and Digor k’ibila ‘bucket’ in Table 2. In Iron, singular nouns in ɐ do not differ from other vowel-final stems, as the paradigm of žɐrdɐ ‘heart’ in Table 1 shows. I postpone a systematic discussion of the properties of ɐ-final stems, and, in particular of plural forms, until Section 7.2.

A remark about syncretism patterns is in place here. The suffix -i in Digor and its cognate -ǝ in Iron serve as the marker of the accusative, genitive, and inessive for lexical nouns. Moreover, it appears as the numeral suffix with nouns in the nominative. While in Digor its phonological properties are unremarkable, in Iron it causes affricativization in velar stops: it turns k into ʧ and g into ʤ. This occurs in all the four functions of the suffix, as is illustrated for k-final stems⁵ in (11).

Synchronically, this is not an automatic phonological rule: the superessive suffix -ǝl, which also begins in ǝ, does not cause palatalization: kark ‘chicken’ kark-ǝl chicken-SUP ‘on the chicken’; fɐndag ‘road’, fɐndag-ǝl road-SUP ‘along the road’.

For pronouns, the situation is more complex: each pronoun can exhibit one, two, or three inflectional stems, as illustrated in Tables 3–4 for personal pronouns and in Table 5 for wh-pronouns. The inessive form is not used with pronouns and, accordingly, the respective row is missing from the tables, see the discussion in Footnote 14 below.

If the case markers in Ossetic were clitics, and not affixes, the fact that they may undergo ellipsis might have been less surprising.⁶ However, Ossetic case markers are definitely affixes: this claim is substantiated, for instance, by the fact that case suffixes can attach to the stems that are not independent words, contrary to what would be expected for clitics.⁷ This happens, for instance, for the stems kɐ- ‘who’ (Ir., Dig.) and cɐ- (Dig.)/ sɐ- (Ir.) ‘what’, as a partial paradigm in Table 5 illustrates. Additionally, for the plural forms of some wh-based indefinites, the case marker may be trapped inside a word form. For instance, in the ablative plural of ‘who’ the ablative marker precedes the plural marker kam-ɐj-t-i who-ABL-PL-OBL ‘from whom’ (Digor). This behavior is entirely unexpected for clitics.

Accordingly, if suspended affixation in Ossetic is a result of ellipsis, this ellipsis process must indeed target parts of words.

2.2 Coordination and disjunction

For coordination, the conjunction ɐma (Digor)/ɐmɐ (Iron) is used, which is placed between the coordinands, (12).

Besides that, in Iron, DPs can be coordinated by means of the negative marker nɐ, which is placed in front of each coordinand to express the meaning ‘neither … nor’ (13).

For reasons discussed in Section 5.2 below, the emphatic enclitic =dɐr can attach to both conjuncts (14a). In this case, the coordinating conjunction may be omitted (14b). Under negative coordination, =dɐr attaches to the conjunctions nɐ= rather than to the coordinated DPs (14c).

Two different lexical items (Digor kenɐ/Iron kɐnɐ and ɐvi) are used for disjunction, only one of which, ɐvi, can occur in alternative questions.⁸

When the alternatives of a questions are expressed by DPs (e.g. ‘Do you fear SNAKES or DOGS?’), some speakers of Ossetic prefer the second disjunct to follow the entire question (16a) rather than have both DPs precede the verb (16b).

3.1 Big disjunct analysis in Ossetic

Ossetic-specific evidence for an ellipsis analysis of alternative questions comes from the behavior of Wackernagel clitics in alternative questions. Ossetic has a large number of Wackernagel and almost Wackernagel clitics. In Iron, they obligatorily occupy the appropriately defined second position of the clause, Lowe & Belyaev (2015), while in Digor placement of the cluster is somewhat freer, Erschler (2010).

In Iron, the clitic cluster is placed after the first word of the clause, (18a–b). If the first constituent is an NP or a DP, however, enclitics attach to the right edge of the noun phrase, (18c–d).

In Digor, (extended) noun phrases are impenetrable for clitics as well, (19a) but the clitic cluster may be placed further from the sentence left edge than in Iron, although acceptability of such sentences decreases the further the clitics are from the second position, (19b–c).

Now, in Iron, ta ‘again’,⁹ which we have already seen in (18c), is a Wackernagel clitic. In (20), it encliticizes to ɐvi ‘or’, which shows that the constituent ‘or again a potato pie’ forms a separate clause: otherwise we would expect ta to cliticize in the second position of the whole sentence, after the constituent Alan-DAT. Furthermore, semantically the clitic ta ‘again’ modifies the event of making a potato pie in (20a) and of biting Khetag in (20b). It is hard to see how to derive these meaning unless the conjunction ‘or’ introduces an entire clause rather than a DP.¹⁰

If, on the other hand, =ta attaches to the first constituents in (20a–b), we obtain two different readings:

The scope evidence can be replicated for Digor as well. In the Digor sentence in (22a), babɐj ‘again’, an almost Wackernagel clitic, only takes scope¹¹ over the clause ‘made a potato pie’, which shows that ‘for Alan, his mother a meat pie’ is a separate clause, an outcome of backward gapping, (22b).

Finally, under the word order illustrated in (16a), with the second alternative following the entire question, the ellipsis is rather obvious given the standard assumptions about coordination (23): otherwise, a sentence would be coordinated with a DP.

As an additional piece of evidence,¹² one can add that non-constituents may be ostensibly disjoined in Ossetic alternative questions. In (24), soslan-i ʁɐwungɐ-bɐl Soslan-ACC street-SUP ‘Soslan in the street’ is clearly not a constituent: ‘in the street’ is supposed to modify the event of seeing rather than the DP Soslan.

3.2 Minor varieties of alternative questions

Even speakers who prefer alternative questions without ostensible disjunction of DPs as in (23), allow ostensible disjunction in fragment questions and split questions, as is schematically shown in (25a) and (25b), respectively. The term “split questions” was introduced by Arregi (2010).

As argued in Arregi (2010), derivation of split questions involves deletion of the rest of the material in a full-fledged alternative question. This analysis (and the arguments in its favor) can be applied verbatim to isolated fragment alternative questions, which, to the best of my knowledge have not been addressed in the literature: the bulk of the research on fragments focuses on fragment answers, see Merchant (2005); Weir (2014), and references there.

An additional variety of alternative questions are “or-sluices”: embedded alternative questions where everything but the ostensible disjuncts is deleted. In other words, these are embedded fragment alternative questions. Such constructions are relatively common cross-linguistically. In the German sentence in (26a), the or-sluice is (dem) Uwe oder (dem) Jan DEF.DAT Uwe or DEF.DAT Jan ‘Uwe or Jan’. In the Polish sentence in (26b), the or-sluice is (czy) ryż czy kasz-ę gryczan-ą Q rice.ACC Q buckwheat-ACC porridge-ACC ‘rice or kasha’.

Note that in both sentences in (26), the DPs in the sluices stand in the case assigned by the verb in the antecedent, the dative by schmeicheln ‘to flatter’ in (26a), and the accusative by ugotować ‘to cook’ in (26b). In the same way as for regular sluicing, Ross (1969[2012]); Merchant (2001), this fact serves as evidence for ellipsis derivation of or-sluices.

Ossetic languages have all these varieties of reduced alternative questions: fragment questions (27a), split questions (27b), and or-sluices (27c). As we will see in the next section, SA of case markers is possible in all of them. For the sake of clarity, now I only give the variants without SA.

4.1 Descriptive generalizations

In the descriptive literature, suspended affixation in Ossetic was addressed in Kulaev (1981); two different theoretical analyses (with additional descriptive details) were proposed in Erschler (2012a) and Belyaev (2014). Descriptively, suspended affixation in Ossetic has the following properties.

1. Suspended affixation occurs with any type of coordinator.

2. SA only proceeds backwards.

3. Only case markers, and any case markers, may be suspended.

4. Remnants under suspended affixation construction must be substrings of the respective full forms (modulo phonological readjustments, and one very interesting exception that concerns numeral phrases, which will be discussed below).

5. A remnant under SA substring must be an actual independent word.

6. This word should not have an accidental idiosyncratic lexical meaning.

7. When both conjuncts are pronouns or are marked with the enclitic =dɐr, suspended affixation is ungrammatical.

To comment upon property (A), suspended affixation freely occurs under coordination with ‘and’, (28a), negative coordination (28b), and under disjunction, (28c). The DPs that participate in SA are bolded. I postpone the discussion of SA in alternative questions until the next subsection.

Property (B), that SA only proceeds backwards, requires the shared affix to appear on the rightmost conjunct: the grammatical example in (29a) with the dative case marker is removed on the first conjunct satisfies this property, while its mirror image (29b), where an attempt is made to remove the case suffix on the second conjunct, is ungrammatical.

Property (C) states that only case suffixes (and any case markers) can be suspended in Ossetic. Unlike in Turkish (see Lewis 1967; Kornfilt 1996; 1997; and Kabak 2007) and in some other Turkic languages, the nominal plural marker cannot be suspended, nor is SA available for any verbal suffixes. SA is possible for any morphological case in Ossetic (30), no matter as structural as the case of the possessors in (30a), lexically assigned by the verb as the allative in (30b) or the ablative in (28b), or semantic, as the inessive (which is expressed the oblique suffix in this instance) in (30c), the allative in (28a), or the superessive in (28c).

Property (D), that remnants under SA must be substrings of the respective full forms, describes the contrast of the type illustrated in (31). While dɐw, the stem of dɐw-bɐl and an independent word, the oblique (i.e. the accusative and genitive) form of du ‘you.SG’ is possible in SA (31a), the nominative form du, which is not a substring of dɐw-bɐl, is judged ungrammatical¹³ (31b).

Readjustments will be discussed in sections 7.2 and 7.3 below.

Property (E) is that a stem that cannot function as an independent word may not appear as a remnant under SA. For instance, in Iron Ossetic, the reciprocal stem kɐrɐzi is a word, whereas its Digor cognate, kɐrɐʤe, cannot be used without a case suffix. Accordingly, in Iron but not in Digor the reciprocal stem may serve as a non-last conjunct in suspended affixation constructions. The two sentences in (32a–b), the grammatical Iron one and the ungrammatical Digor one (32b), are fully parallel. The grammatical Digor sentence in (32c) shows that (32b) becomes grammatical once the case marker is restored on kɐrɐʤe.

Property (F) requires that the remainder under SA may not be a word with an idiosyncratic meaning, which accidentally or for diachronic reasons coincides with a conjunct minus the suspended affix. This property can be illustrated by the behavior of the Iron wəm ‘there’, historically the inessive of the third person singular pronoun. As it has acquired an idiosyncratic lexical meaning,¹⁴ it cannot serve as the remainder in (33a).¹⁵

To illustrate the working of (G), the ban on emphasis on both disjuncts, consider the pairs of sentences in (34). In (34a), SA with two coordinated pronouns is attempted. The sentence is well-formed with respect to constraints (A–F). It is nevertheless ungrammatical, while its counterpart without SA (34b) is fine. Likewise, (34c) is an attempt to do SA with two DPs marked with the enclitic =dɐr and coordinated by the conjunction ‘and’. The control (34d) is the same sentence without =dɐr, where SA is fully grammatical. Finally (34e–f) illustrate the same effect for ‘neither … nor’ coordination.

The reasons for this phenomenon will be addressed in Section 5.2.

4.2 Suspended affixation in alternative questions

Crucially for the argument of this paper, SA in Ossetic is also possible in alternative questions, which, as we have seen, are derived by ellipsis in these languages. In written texts, suspended affixation is admittedly rare in such contexts, however, it is judged possible by native speakers both in unreduced alternative questions,¹⁶ (35), and different varieties of reduced alternative questions, (36–38).

In (35a), the ablative marker can be omitted on the DP ‘dog’. The ablative is lexically assigned by the verb ‘to fear’ to the cause of fear. In (35b), the oblique, which in this case functions as the inessive, can be omitted on the DP ‘Vladikavkaz’.

In the fragment question in (36) the ablative marker on the first disjunct, again assigned by the verb ‘to fear’, may be omitted.

To illustrate SA in split questions, in the question in (37a), the oblique marker, which can be omitted on the first disjunct ‘table’ serves as the genitive: both ‘feast’ and ‘funeral’ are possessors of the word ‘table’. In (37b), the ablative can be omitted on the first disjunct, Alan.

To illustrate SA in or-sluices, in the sluice ‘in Matsuta or in Dzinagha’ in (38a), the oblique serves as the inessive. It can be dropped on ‘Matsuta’. In (38b), the sluice is ‘Madina or Fatima’ and the suspended case is the allative, which is lexically assigned by the verb ‘to wait’. In (38c), the sluice is ‘Madina or Fatima’, and the oblique, which can be suspended, functions as the accusative. Finally, in (38d), the sluice is ‘to Sarmat or to Uruzmag’ and the suspended case, the allative, is assigned to the addressee of the verb ‘to talk’.

4.3 Suspended affixation in alternative questions: Implications for analyses

Let us now see why existence of SA in alternative questions that are derived by ellipsis compels us to a deletion analysis of the question. Given that the DPs ostensibly disjoint in an alternative question in actuality do not belong to the same VP, any approach that analyzes SA as assignment of case to the entire &P will wrongly predict SA to be impossible in alternative questions.

Now let us see how the exponent deletion analysis derives suspended affixation in Ossetic alternative questions. For instance, consider the derivation of the sentence in (35a). At the first stage, an alternative question will be derived with case affixes on both DPs, (39). To repeat, the precise mechanism of case assignment is immaterial for our current purposes. To be specific, I represent the structure as a disjunction of two VPs, but nothing will substantially change in the argument if larger constituents are to be disjoined. As I have argued in section 3.1, the verb deletes in the first of the VPs in (39).

At the second stage, when the DPs that are to share an affix are already string-adjacent, the affix on the first of them undergoes deletion, (40).

Derivation of sentences in (35b) and (36–38) is analogous to the one shown above, modulo an additional step, ellipsis of everything except the DP in the other disjunct.

Accordingly, no matter what a concrete technical implementation, suspended affixation in alternative questions can only be achieved by morpheme deletion.¹⁷ In the next section, I lay out a specific proposal to this effect.

5.1 Place of deletion in derivation

I adopt the standard assumptions of distributed morphology, Halle & Marantz (1993; 1994); Halle (1997); Noyer (1997); Embick & Noyer (2001); Siddiqi (2010); and Arregi & Nevins (2012). I assume thus that syntactic computations operate with feature bundles, while vocabulary insertion of the exponents occurs late in the derivation. Vocabulary insertion is followed by phonological readjustments (application of morpheme-specific rules in terms of Arregi & Nevins 2012). The existence of this stage is motivated by intuitively clear difference between the choice of phonologically unmotivated allomorphs (e.g. I vs. me) and phonologically motivated changes (e.g. the English indefinite article taking the form a before consonant-initial words and an before vowel-initial ones).

Under these assumptions, it makes sense to ask when deletion occurs. The logically possible options are deletion of feature bundles prior to vocabulary insertion,¹⁸ deletion of inserted exponents before phonological readjustments, and deletion after the readjustments have taken place.

I propose that morpheme deletion proceeds after vocabulary insertion but prior to application of morpheme specific rules. Other possibilities necessarily lead to incorrect empirical predictions.

If we assume that deletion precedes VI, we would expect allomorphy contexts to be destroyed, and, in particular, the default allomorphs of pronouns, rather than their oblique forms, to surface under SA, as shown in (31), repeated here as (41), for the 2SG pronoun.

If deletion had occurred after the application of morpheme specific rules, we would expect results of readjustments to remain visible after SA. For instance, as we have seen in Section 2.1 the oblique suffix in Iron causes affricativization of velar stops (42a). However, under SA, the respective stems surface in their underlying form: in (42b) it is park rather than *parʧ in the first conjunct.

Other examples of readjustments relevant for the morphophonology of SA in Ossetic are addressed in Sections 7.1 and 7.2.

• The derivation is thus proposed to proceed in the following stages.

• Step I. Ellipsis that forms alternative questions occurs.

• Step II. Vocabulary insertion.

• Step III. Checking the licensing condition and morpheme deletion

• Step IV. Phonological readjustment

Given that gapping, including backwards gapping, is insensitive to the PF identity, it is reasonable to assume that it occurs prior to VI. If one adopts the proposal of Murphy (2016) who treats gapping as VI of null exponents, one can unify Stage I and Stage II of this derivation.

5.2 Licensing conditions

I propose that two conditions need to hold in order for morpheme deletion to proceed in Ossetic: the underlying form of the deleted affix must be identical to its overt correlate, and additionally, the coordinands or disjuncts should not all bear [+EMP] feature.

Full pronouns carry this feature as part of their lexical specification; while on lexical DPs, it is marked with the enclitic =dɐr. I stay agnostic as to the precise semantic interpretation of [+EMP] feature. The reason to postulate it is that both =dɐr marking and use of full pronouns is associated with some kind of prominence that is hard to precisely capture at the present stage of research.

As we have seen in Section 2, Ossetic languages use several series of personal pronouns. For subjects, Romance-type pro-drop occurs. For non-subject pronouns, the clitic forms are used by default. A large amount of generative literature has strived to pin down the difference between clitic and non-clitic pronouns in such languages, starting at least with Cardinaletti & Starke (1999), see also Neeleman & Szendrői (2007) and Sigurðsson (2011). Although the difference is often identified with something like contrast (“strong” pronouns tend to appear when some contrast is present), see, a.o., Öztürk (2001); Frascarelli (2007); Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl (2007); and Sigurðsson (2011), it is not clear whether they only appear in the presence of contrast, see examples in Cardinaletti & Starke (1995: 163) for Romance languages and in Bohnacker (2013) for Swabian, a Southern German variety, which, as Bohnacker argues, exhibits a Romance-type pro-drop.

The idea to include the respective prima facie information-structural feature in the lexical makeup of a pronoun was advanced by Herbeck (2016) who proposes that, in Spanish, overt subject pronouns have feature [+Foc] in their feature bundle. I propose that a purely formal [+EMP] feature underlies the occurrences of strong pronouns in Ossetic.

As for the enclitic =dɐr, besides its occurrences in coordinations, it also may be used in the capacity of scalar particles ‘too’ and ‘even’. Additionally, it marks universal quantifiers in the absence of the clausal negation. Provisionally, I propose that all these uses involve the same feature [+EMP] as overt pronouns.

If this proposal is on the right track, a plausible reason why a considerable number of speakers disallow SA in alternative question can be that, for such speakers, the disjuncts of an alternative question both carry [+EMP] feature.

5.3 Directionality of morpheme deletion

In Ossetic, suffix deletion only proceeds backwards, nor am I aware of any cross-linguistic evidence for forward suffix deletion, as schematized in (43).

At present, SA is the only known ellipsis variety in Ossetic that may only proceed backwards. Gapping and sluicing that can proceed in both directions in Ossetic. On the other hand, stripping can only proceed forward, as the contrast illustrates between the grammatical sentence in (44a) and the ungrammatical one in (44b). This shows that Ossetic in principle allows unidirectional ellipsis types, and it is not particularly surprising that there exists one that only can proceed backwards.

Correctly predicting the cross-linguistic variation of ellipsis directionality is a problem for all existing accounts of ellipsis, and I leave the matter for the further research.

6.1 Ban on non-words as remnants under suspended affixation

I propose that the ban for non-words to serve as SA remnants ensues from a general property of the syntax-phonology interface: I take being able to occur as a free-standing word a lexical diacritic, and only free-standing words can be coordinated in Ossetic.

Languages vary on whether this constraint is absolute: Polish, for instance is reported to have constructions where a verbal prefix, for instance prze- in (45), is ostensibly coordinated with a phrase.

Ossetic, although possesses a system of verbal prefixes similar to a Slavic one, disallows such constructions. The ungrammatical (46) is a direct counterpart of (45). In (46), a stranded preverb nǝ- stands for the phrase nǝ-ffǝšta pišmo prezident-mɐ ‘wrote a letter to the president’, and is coordinate with the phrase ra-fǝšta pišmo prezident-mɐ ‘copied a letter to the president’.

6.2 Restriction of suspended affixation to case markers

As we have seen, suspended affixation in Ossetic can only target case markers: unlike in Turkish, the nominal plural marker or the verb agreement suffixes cannot undergo SA.

The ban on suspended affixation of plural markers is motivated by the requirement for an SA remnant to be a word: on their own, plural stems are not independent words.

The plural is formed from the plural stem and the plural suffix -tɐ. Plural stems often undergo small, but unpredictable changes as compared to singular stems. For instance, in Iron, qug ‘cow’ yields in the plural quʦ:itɐ ‘cows’ with a change g > ʦ:i; but dug ‘epoch’ becomes dugtɐ ‘epochs’, without any change in the stem. Likewise, in the plural stem of gal ‘bull’ no changes occur: the plural is galtɐ ‘bulls’, but in a word with a similar final syllable a change does occur: ɐmbal ‘friend’, ɐmbɐlttɐ ‘friends: the a of the final syllable becomes ɐ and the -t- of the plural marker reduplicates. Accordingly, the plural stems must be inserted as allomorphs at the stage of vocabulary insertion, and phonological readjustment cannot undo these changes.

Suspended affixation is impossible for any verb forms either (47). I argue that this follows from the requirements for the remnant to be an extant word (already discussed in Section 6.1) and to not have an idiosyncratic meaning of its own.

All the verb forms are based on either the present stem or the past stem. For a given verb, its past stem is not synchronically predictable as illustrated by the three Iron forms in Table 6: the present stems only differ in the initial consonant, but the past stems are formed differently for all the three. The natural conclusion is the relationship between a present stem and the past stem is listed lexically.

The status of present stems is somewhat different in Digor and Iron: in Digor, they cannot function as independent words, while in Iron they coincide with the second person imperative form.¹⁹ Accordingly, what prevents SA with present stem verbs in Digor is that the would-be remnant would not be a word, while in Iron, the remnant would be interpreted as the imperative.

The past stem, for the vast majority of the verbs, coincides with the past participle, which obviously is a word. However, the past participle on its own has the distribution of a noun. I propose that this is what prevents SA with verb forms created from the past stem.

7.1 Suspended affixation and numeral phrases

Belyaev²⁰ (2014) noticed an interesting pattern in SA with numeral phrases, which, as an anonymous reviewer suggests, can be a problem for the analysis presented in this paper. Before presenting the relevant data, and arguing why they do not actually pose a problem for my analysis, I need to recall some facts about numerals and numeral phrases in Ossetic already touched upon in Section 4.1.

The numeral precedes the noun phrase. When the entire phrase stands in the nominative, the (phrase-final) noun gets marked with a suffix that is homophonous to the oblique case marker, -ə in Iron and -i in Digor (48a, c). The usual plural marking of the noun is impossible in the presence of a numeral (48 b, d).

If the entire phrase stands in a case other than the nominative, the marking patterns differ somewhat in Iron and Digor. In Iron, the numeral suffix on the noun gets “overwritten” by the case assigned to the entire DP (49).

In Digor, on the other hand, numerals have a separate inflectional paradigm, and it is an exponent from this paradigm that appears on the noun in a numeral phrase, as illustrated in Table 7. Specifically, a suffix -e- or -em-, depending on the case, is inserted between the stem and the case marker.

Now, as was observed in Belyaev (2014), when two numeral phrases are coordinated, for many speakers it is the numeral suffix (i.e. the one homophonous to the oblique case) rather than the nominative (or null) marking that emerges under SA. In (50a) and (50c), the superessive gets assigned by the verbs ‘to meet’ and ‘to bite’, respectively; and in (50b) the ablative is assigned by the preposition ‘without’.

Given that the numeral suffix is homophonous with the oblique (i.e. genitive/accusative) case marker (-i in Digor and -ǝ in Iron), it seems prima facie natural to identify it with this case marker. Under this assumption, its behavior under SA is not what the system I have laid out here predicts. For instance, in (50a), when the superessive case is assigned to both conjuncts, we obtain (without suspended affixation):

Under the assumption that the marker -ǝ/-i assigned by the numeral is case, we must conclude that, as a result of deletion, the first conjunct would have to lose overt case marking (52a), which is not what happens for many speakers (52b):

However, it is plausible that the numeral suffix is not a form of case marking, but a different entity,²² specifically, a form of plural marking that is only used in the presence of numerals. Accordingly, SA is not expected to apply to it: (52a) will be ill formed because of the absence of the plural marking.²³

Another way to explain the grammaticality of (50) could be to assume that the external case is only assigned to the second conjunct in (50a–b). However, this is not what happens in Ossetic. As we have seen in Section 4.1, if the case could be assigned only to the second conjunct, we would expect to obtain, alongside with (53a), also (53b), with the pronoun in the nominative. However, such sentences are ungrammatical.

To conclude, the idiosyncratic behavior of numeral morphology does not present a problem to deletion-based analyses of SA in Ossetic.

7.2 Behavior of ɐ-final stems

When a noun with an ɐ-final stem participates in SA, the remnant can ostensibly violate generalization (D) that the remnant under SA must be a substring of the corresponding full form (54). Such nouns include plural stems in both languages and ɐ-final singular stems in Digor.²⁴ This is one important situation where the relative timing of ellipsis and phonological readjustments plays a role is SA with ɐ-final stems. Under SA, when a noun of this type is (the head of) the first conjunct, the final -ɐ obligatorily resurfaces (54).

On my proposal, this is accounted for by the assumption that deletion of a case morpheme occurs before readjustments take place, and that deletion of the stem-final -ɐ in front of a vowel-initial suffix is a readjustment that occurs to resolve hiatus. If the case suffix is deleted, no need for a readjustment arises, and the final -ɐ is retained.

When discussing morphophonology of case marking in Section 4.1, we have postponed examination of ɐ-final stems. Now is the time to resume this discussion. When such a noun takes a vowel-initial case suffix, the final -ɐ of the stem disappears, Table 8.

With consonant-initial case stems, that is, the allative -mɐ in Digor and -m in Iron, and the superessive -bɐl in Digor, the final -ɐ is retained, Table 9.

Under the current proposal, the derivation of the normal Digor oblique zɐrdi heart.OBL and of its occurrence in the suspended affixation in (54a) proceeds in the following steps. In the absence of suspended affixation, vocabulary insertion produces zɐrdɐ-i, which undergoes readjustment to result in zɐrdɐ-i. In a suspended affixation configuration, the derivation proceeds as shown in (55): vocabulary insertion again produces zɐrdɐ-i, after which morpheme deletion applies.

This is not the only situation when a morpheme-final -ɐ gets deleted to resolve hiatus: the same process occurs, for instance, with the prefix ɐnɐ- ‘without’: it surfaces as ɐnɐ- before consonants and as ɐn- before vowels, Table 10.

Accordingly, interpreting the deletion of -ɐ before vowel-initial suffixes as a phonological readjustment is independently motivated.

7.3 Case marking of reflexives

Finally, Belyaev (2014) reports that SA is possible for some speakers of Iron Ossetic²⁵ when the first conjunct is a reflexive pronoun. An anonymous reviewer suggests that these data are problematic for the current proposal given the peculiar morphology of the case marking in reflexives, see Table 3 below. In this section, I advance a proposal about the representation of the reflexive morphology in the grammars of such speakers.

For speakers who allow SA with reflexives the bare stem χi- emerges in the first conjunct. For instance, in (56a), the first conjunct is mɐ=χi 1SG=REFL instead of the expected ablative-marked form mɐ=χisaj 1SG=REFL.ABL. Likewise, in (56b), the first conjunct is the same bare stem, instead of the superessive-marked mɐ=χiwǝl 1SG=REFL.SUP.

These facts are surprising because case paradigms of reflexives in Ossetic are somewhat peculiar. Reflexives are formed by the reflexive stem χe- (Digor) / χi- (Iron) and a possessive prefix that expresses the phi-features of the binder: dɐ=χi 2.SG=REFL.OBL ‘yourself’ (Iron). The inflection paradigms of the reflexive in Iron and Digor are given in Table 11.

These paradigms show two remarkable features: first, in the dative and the ablative, -c-/-s- appears between the stem and the case marker; second, in the Iron superessive, -w- emerges in the same position.

Prima facie, there are three possible ways to account for this phenomenon. First, one can posit stem allomorphs χis-/χec- and χiw- for the respective cases. Second, one can posit the existence of allomorphs -sɐj/-cɐj of the ablative suffix; -sɐn/-cɐn of the dative suffix and -wǝl of the superessive suffix. Third, insertion of -c-/-s- and -w- can be treated as epenthesis²⁶ that resolves hiatus that is created between the reflexive stem χi- and the vowel-initial case suffixes -ɐn, -ɐj, and -ǝl. It is possible, moreover, that different speakers can have different representations of these consonants in their grammars.

If the consonants -c-/-s- and -w- are parts of the stem, the current account predicts SA with reflexives to be impossible for these cases. We would have expected to obtain χec-/χis- and χiw- as the remnants under SA, but they are not independent words and the derivation would have crashed.

I propose to treat the insertion of these consonants as morpheme-specific epenthesis, see various proposals for morpheme-specific phonology in Kisseberth (1970); Kirchner (1993); Nouveau 1994; Ito & Mester (1995a; b); Orgun 1996; Inkelas (1999); Pater (2000; 2010); Anttila (2002); Caballero 2005; and Inkelas & Zoll (2007).

Therefore, it occurs at the stage of phonological readjustment, and, if the case suffix is deleted at the preceding stage, epenthesis is no longer motivated and does not occur at all.

The interpretation of -c-/-s- as an epenthetic consonant is independently motivated by the fact that, in Iron, an epenthetic -s- also appears between certain vowel-final preverbs²⁷ and the stem in some a-initial verbs in Iron, Table 12.

A reviewer objects that this leads to a single root χi using two different epenthetic consonants, -w- and -s-. Diachronic reasons for this are clear: historically, as the reviewer correctly remarks, -w- is a reflex of the initial -b of the superessive suffix. As long as the case suffix was stop-initial, no epenthetic consonant was needed. Synchronically, it is reasonable to assume that -w- has gotten reanalyzed as an epenthetic glide: for the reciprocal kɐrɐzi it is already in free variation with the default glide -j-. Additionally, w is in variation with j or null in widon; (j)idon ‘bridle’ widaz/(j)idaz ‘reins’ Abaev (1989: 105–106). It also appears in the onset in wasin ‘ladder’ in the Kudar dialect of Iron spoken in South Ossetia, as opposed to ašin in North Ossetian Iron, (Cheung 2008: 215, the editor’s footnote).

To recapitulate, I propose that speakers of Iron who allow SA with reflexives treat -w- and -s- that emerge in different paradigm cells as epenthetic consonants and insert them at the stage of phonological readjustments.

8.1 Two-layer case assignment to &P or orP

I overview here the analysis of Belyaev (2014) eschewing, however, the LFG formalism he couches it in. The crucial point is that this argument presupposes that SA only happens in real coordinations and does not allow an intermediate stage of ellipsis.

Belyaev (2014) proposes that each case in Ossetic is composed of two layers of features: the first layer is feature [Dir] or [Obl], and the second layer consists of features for all other cases other than the nominative, i.e. [Gen], [Dat], etc. He assumes that the accusative and the genitive are underlyingly the same case in Ossetic, but this does not seem to be crucial for his analysis or my arguments against it.

An item in the nominative than will have feature specification {[Dir], Ø} and an item in the case other than the nominative {[Obl], [Case]}, where [Case] is the morphological case of the item, e.g. the dative. For a pronoun in the case other than nominative, e.g. mɐn-ɐn I-DAT the stem mɐn will bear [Obl] feature while the case marker -ɐn will express the feature [Dat].

Suspended affixation is assumed to occur in surface-true coordinations. When case is assigned to coordinated DPs, both coordinands must have the same inner case feature, that is, they must be either all [Dir] (57a–a’) or all [Obl] (57b–b’), while the outer case feature can be only assigned to the rightmost coordinand, i.e. it is the outer case that is assigned to &P as a whole.

Ungrammatical coordinations of a nominative pronoun with a non-nominative DP, such as illustrated in (53b) above, will be ruled out because the coordinands will not match in the feature [Obl]/[Dir].

Under the assumption that case in SA construction is only exponed on the rightmost edge of &P, the retention of the numeral morphology under SA discussed in section 7.1 above is a priori not a problem.

Finally, to the best of my understanding, the approach of Belyaev (2014) does not predict the ungrammaticality of SA for two coordinated pronouns, or two lexical DPs marked with =dɐr. Probably, the proposal could be modified to account for this fact, but the fact that the outer case attaches to &P as a whole appears to be crucial for Belyaev (2014).

8.2 Deletion of features

On the current proposal, deletion targets morphemes. One can envisage an alternative system where features are allowed to delete one by one, irrespective of whether the deleted feature corresponds to a vocabulary item. Such a system, however, will vastly overgenerate. For Ossetic, one immediate prediction of a deletion by feature analysis concerns the nominal plural. If the deletion had targeted single features and thus were unrelated to vocabulary insertion, we would expect that the nominal plural be deletable. However, as we have seen in Section 6.2, this is not the case. Further examples of overgeneration require a more careful examination of the relevant feature geometry. I will address here two such instances: of possessive marking in Turkish compounds, where Kharytonava (2012) proposed a feature deletion analysis, and, closer home, of SA in Ossetic.

The relevant Turkish facts are the following. In a non-coordinated compound without a possessor, the 3rd person possessive suffix appears on the head of the compound, -i in (58a). In possessed compounds, it gets replaced by the possessive suffix whose phi-features match those of the possessor, -iniz in (58b).

When two heads are coordinated, in the absence of SA, both carry a possessive suffix (59).

Somewhat analogously to the case marking and NUM marking in Ossetic DPs with numerals (as was discussed in Section 4.2), the possessive marker on the first conjunct may undergo partial deletion (60a) to leave the 3rd person possessive suffix, or complete deletion, (60b).

Kharytonava (2012) proposes a natural feature representation of the Turkish possessive suffixes. Underlyingly, the head yer ‘place’ of the first coordinand in (59) are assumed to carry the features corresponding to the 3rd person singular and the 2nd person plural. The 2nd person plural suffix is assumed to be inserted as more fully specified, according to the standard Panini principle. (60a) is derived if the features corresponding to the 2nd person plural suffix are all deleted simultaneously, while in (60b) all the possessive phi-features have deleted.

However, under such an analysis, the fact is accidental that both the features corresponding to the 2nd person and the plural are deleted simultaneously. Should deletion indeed proceed feature by feature, we would expect that the possessor’s feature [+PL] could be deleted on its own. In the case of the sentence in (59), this would produce the sentence in (61) with the 2nd person singular suffix on the first conjunct. However, this sentence is ungrammatical.

To ensure that only grammatical sentences in (60) be derived, we must require that ellipsis may only target combinations of features that correspond to actual morphemes. This phenomenon provides evidence for the reality of morphemes, contrary to what is proposed in purely realizational, in the sense of Stump (2001), theories of morphology.

Turning to the case of the SA in Ossetic, let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that feature deletion may follow gapping that creates alternative questions. To compare morpheme-based and feature-based deletion approaches, we need to specify a feature decomposition of cases in Ossetic. Recall that the case inventory of Ossetic is comprised of the nominative; accusative and genitive, which coincide for most lexical items; inessive; dative; ablative; superessive; and equative.

Given that it is the nominative forms that are used as the default forms (in the sense of Schütze 2001), it is natural to consider them unmarked for morphological case,²⁸ that is to assume that they do not bear any morphological case feature.

Then, if we assume that each non-nominative case corresponds to an atomic feature of its own, say [+Dat] for the dative, [+Sup] for the superessive, etc, we predict that, under SA, the nominative forms of pronouns will surface. As we have seen, this prediction is not borne out.

Therefore, it is necessary to posit a richer structure of case features as shown in Table 13.

One must stipulate then that only the external case feature may be deleted (to avoid surfacing of nominative pronominal forms as first conjuncts), and, moreover, that this must be the only type of feature in Ossetic that can undergo deletion, to avoid predicting SA of anything other than case suffixes.

The first conjunct under SA will then only carry the case feature [+NNom], and this will be the only situation when nominals with such a feature specification surface.²⁹ With this stipulation, this system would be essentially equivalent to the one developed in this paper.

8.3 One fell swoop deletion of a verb and a case marker

Crucially, the current proposal assumes that SA in alternative questions proceeds in two stages: verb deletion (which occurs relatively early in derivation) and affix deletion (which occurs after VI). This is what distinguishes the current proposal from some analyses of somewhat similar phenomena in Japanese and Korean.

An anonymous reviewer inquires whether this proposal is substantially different from one advanced for Japanese by Mukai (2003). She addressed the construction illustrated by the sentence in (62) (example (40) in Mukai’s paper). The DP tyokoreeto ‘chocolate’ in (62) lacks the expected accusative marker -ga. She calls this construction verbless conjunction.

Mukai (2003) argues that (62) is derived by PF-level deletion of the string that includes the accustaive case marker -ga and the verb tabeta ‘ate’ as shown in (63).

Effectively, this means that verbless conjunction is an extended type of gapping, with the case marking deleted alongside with the verb. As known since Ross (1970), Japanese only allows backwards gapping. Ossetic, on the other hand, allow both backward and forward gapping. If SA were a byproduct of gapping, we would have expected it possible in forward gapping sentences as well. This would have yielded a construction similar to the one described by An (2016) for Korean.

However, neither the direct analog of (63) with backward gapping nor its “mirror image” with forward gapping are grammatical in Ossetic. (64a), a sentence with backward gapping, is only grammatical if the case marking is retained on the remnant DP ‘her husband’. The same holds for (64b): forwards gapping is possible only if the case marking stays on the remnant.

This shows that SA in Ossetic is a phenomenon different from gapping. On the current proposal, however, SA can be fed by gapping that is required to create a configuration where the DPs participating in SA be adjacent to a conjunction or disjunction.

Additionally, if deletion were purely string-based, we would not be able to account for subtler morphophonological effects discussed in Sections 7.2 and 7.3.