About Closed Morphological Structures

Abstract

The article deals with the analysis of ‘closed’ morphological systems, containing oppositional and contrastive elements. The category of case in the Slavic languages represents the systems of this kind. An attempt is made to shed light on the meaning of the case category in the Russian language. We argue that neither its semantic nor syntactic explanation are taken as being the only criterion of truth. The formal analysis of this category reveals that there is no relationship of noun case forms and that the structuring of pronoun and noun paradigms is different. Case government through prepositions, widely spread in many languages, also fails to explain case distinctions either from only semantic or syntactic perspective. The distribution of words into parts of speech in various languages still remains the only undoubted and common function for all inflectional case paradigms. We view ‘closed’ derivational and inflectional morphological systems as a fundamental condition in this respect; the character of there structure is of little importance; however, formal and unambiguous description can only be applied to the rigidly structured systems.