The Latvian declension

In this paper I examine in some detail the declension of Latvian nouns and adjectives in the light of a descriptive framework for morphology that I have developed in a number of recent papers (Halle 1990a, 1990b). The data examined provide clear evidence for the need to distinguish gender from inflection class, a distinction that is also supported by the facts from other languages reviewed in this volume in the papers by Harris, Hoberman, and Aronoff. In addition — and perhaps more importantly — the Latvian facts illuminate the central role played in the morphology by — what I have called — abstract morphemes and shed interesting new light on the ordering of rules, in particular, on the issue of disjunctive rule order and default rules.