This paper challenges the widespread view of suppletion as nothing but morphologically nonfunctional diachronic residue. Within natural morphology, suppletion has generally been treated as an "unnatural" phenomenon that must be accounted for in extragrammatical terms. A richer notion of diagrammatic iconicity, however, inspired largely by Bybee's work, leads to an analysis in which suppletion in semantically generic, grammaticalized or grammaticalizing items fits quite well into the overall diagrammatic structure of inflecting languages in a way that is consistent with the main principles of natural morphology. I consider Bybee's view that all iconicity/structure should be regarded primarily as an epiphenomenal artifact of use and change but argue that some aspects of morphological change can most easily be understood if we grant some degree of psychological reality to diagrammaticity.
Historical linguists have long been divided in their views about the mechanisms behind paradigm leveling, with many invoking a special mechanism related to a universal preference for paradigm uniformity while others attribute leveling to the same mechanism responsible for other types of analogical change. I argue that although ‘proportional’ analogical innovation plays a major role in paradigm leveling, it cannot account for all cases, and that something akin to the ‘interference’ mechanisms commonly associated with contamination and folk etymology account well for the non-proportional instances. I further show that all of the mechanisms involved in paradigm leveling are also implicated in other types of analogical change, and I argue against the need to posit any universal bias against (stem) allomorphy.
Several kinds of systematic deviations from the Greek original, including simple insertions and omissions of subject pronouns and transformations of nonfinite or impersonal Greek constructions into personal finite clauses, provide evidence concerning the distribution of null and overt referential subject pronouns in Gothic. While the evidence leaves no doubt that Gothic was a null-subject language, it also reveals a tendency, not found in Ancient Greek, toward the use of overt subjects for nontopic antecedents. This Gothic pattern is reminiscent of what a number of researchers have found recently in some other null-subject languages such as Italian, but Gothic appears to occupy an intermediate position between Ancient Greek and Italian.*
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.