Overlapping suppletion and periphrasis: On HAVE, BE, and GO in Gallo-Romance

Abstract

Overlapping suppletion, where two or more lexemes share identical forms taken from one of them, interacts in surprising ways with periphrasis. Based on evidence from dialectal data from Gallo-Romance varieties, the paper aims to study the interaction between the two. The first four sections describe the patterns of overlapping suppletion found to occur between the verbs ‘be’, ‘have’ and ‘go’ in Gallo-Romance varieties. Some theoretical conclusions are drawn, which show that incursion is directional for good historical reasons, on which semantics plays an important role, in particular paradigmatically local synonymy (see Maiden 2014 ). By examining periphrastic forms, a distinction can be made between overlapping suppletion that only targets the stem, that which only targets a wordform (participle), and that which targets the whole inflectional cell. All three situations are shown to be possible. A number of splits within periphrasis in these varieties call for considering periphrastic tenses as part of the paradigm in their whole extensions, not only as far as their lexical part (here the participle) is concerned.