The pre-conditions for suppletion

Börjars, Kersti; Vincent, Nigel

doi:10.1075/la.178.13bor

Cited by 16 publications

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“…This phenomenon is all the more remarkable because, on all otherwise available evidence, in the Romance languages suppletion involving the historical conflation of historically unrelated etyma (as in the present case) is wholly alien to the inflexional paradigms of nouns or adjectives. While unique of its kind in Romance, this suppletion finds a striking parallel in Mainland Scandinavian languages, recently the object of a penetrating theoretical analysis by Börjars and Vincent (2011). Their conclusions bear, in part, on earlier work by Maiden (e.g., 2004), in which it was suggested that suppletion arises when two originally distinct lexemes become synonymous, or at any rate cease to be clearly distinct to speakers; an assumed universal tendency to avoid synonymy leads to the loss of one of the coexisting lexemes, and sometimes this can happen in such a way that one lexeme prevails in one subpart of the inflexional paradigm, whilst the other prevails elsewhere.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

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Two suppletive adjectives in Megleno-Romanian

Maiden

2014

RRO

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This study involves the existence in Megleno-Romanian dialects of a lexically suppletive distinction between singular and plural forms of the adjectives meaning 'small' and 'big' . The phenomenon has gone largely unnoticed both by comparative Romance linguists and by morphological theorists yet it is both typologically surprising and theoretically significant. Analysis of a remarkably similar phenomenon in mainland Scandinavian languages led Börjars and Vincent (2011) to propose a considerably attenuated version of Maiden's claim (2004) that lexical synonymy can drive the diachronic emergence of suppletion. My close investigation of the the source of the suppletion in Megleno-Romanian, and consideration of the Scandinavian facts in the light of the Megleno-Romanian data, will show that in fact the emergence of suppletion in just these adjectives constitutes excellent evidence for the claim that lexical synonymy favours suppletion.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…and specifically in respect of the adjective meaning 'little' . 25 The facts are described and analysed in detail by Börjars and Vincent (2011). Briefly, the modern Danish and Swedish 26 lexemes meaning 'small' show a continuant of old Scandinavian lítil 'small' in the singular, but of the unrelated, but semantically very close, smár, in the plural.…”

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confidence: 99%

Two suppletive adjectives in Megleno-Romanian

Maiden

2014

RRO

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“…In many respects, it would be tempting to conclude that what were once separate lexemes have now merged into a single lexical unit. As mentioned in section 5.5, this is what typically happens with actual suppletion (Rudes ; Börjars & Vincent ): to take a well‐known example, the three distinct Latin verbs īre , vadere , and ambulāre , eventually merged into a single verb in Old French, surviving merely as allomorphs within the word's tense system (resp. j'irai, je vais, j'allais …).…”

Section: Final Discussion: One or Two Words?mentioning

confidence: 85%

Verbal Number in Lo–Toga and Hiw: The Emergence of a Lexical Paradigm

François

2019

Trans of the Philol Soc

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Several languages around the world encode number through a regular alternation between verb roots, in a pattern sometimes called ‘verbal number suppletion’ (Veselinova 2006). Lo–Toga and Hiw, two Oceanic languages of Vanuatu (Torres Islands), thus alternate certain verbs according to their absolutive argument's number – e.g. Hiw tō ‘go:Sing’ vs. vën ‘go:Plural’. The pattern affects 17 verb pairs in Lo–Toga, 33 in Hiw. This rich system is a local innovation in the Torres Islands, not found elsewhere in Oceanic. This structure is here analysed for the first time. Verbal number is not just agreement: its principles and categories differ from nominal number. Despite its similarity with suppletion, the structure really involves separate words, organised into a ‘lexical paradigm’ – a structured set of lexical pairs, contrasting individual vs. collective events. The comparative method helps reconstruct the system's development. A former circumfix encoding pluractionality was the source for the number alternation; yet most verbs encoded the contrast lexically, as near‐synonyms were harnessed into the emergent paradigm. Crucially, even after it was recruited into the number paradigm, each verb remained an autonomous lexeme. While nominal number belongs to the morphology, the paradigm of verbal number in the Torres languages pertains entirely to the lexicon.

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“…There are many reasons given in the literature for the initial trigger for suppletion: lack of phonetic substance (especially of monosyllabic, often also unaccented or clitic, forms), lack of a stem consonant (or lack of a stem at all), frequency of the respective item, morphological irregularity, homophony with other forms, growing functionality/increasing semantic vagueness of the item at issue, avoidance of synonymy, etc. In what follows we will give a short overview on some of these motivations mentioned in the literature (see also Börjars & Vincent ).…”

Section: On the Nature Of Suppletionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For many morphological theories, suppletion is a case of exceptional behaviour that is difficult to account for. Börjars & Vincent (: 240) write that ‘[t]he existence of suppletion is not predicted by any morpho‐syntactic theory'. For the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology (DM) instead, suppletion is one of the ‘show cases' for the reasonability and elegance of its approach to morphological realisations that are, besides their common semantic content, maximally distinct from each other.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbal Suppletion in Romance Synchrony and Diachrony: The Perspective of Distributed Morphology

Pomino

Remberger

2019

Trans of the Philol Soc

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This article studies the various suppletive patterns found with respect to the Romance movement verb go, both under a diachronic and a synchronic perspective, within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). The Romance varieties all started with the loss of verbal forms of Lat. īre – indeed, there is no Romance variety that retained the full paradigm – but reached different solutions in diachrony. A particular case, implemented by underspecified Vocabulary Items in DM, is overlapping suppletion, as found in Spanish, where the absolute default auxiliary be shares part of its forms with go. In this article, different types of suppletion are distinguished and selected aspects of suppletion are analysed in order to illustrate how DM can systematically account for them. From the perspective of DM, we discuss why non‐categorial suppletion is restricted to the present tense, how resistance to innovation of 1/2pl can be modelled and how subsequent analogical levelling can be formalised. Finally, we show why, as in Ibero‐Romance, forms of be can be used for go.

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The pre-conditions for suppletion

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Two suppletive adjectives in Megleno-Romanian

Two suppletive adjectives in Megleno-Romanian

Verbal Number in Lo–Toga and Hiw: The Emergence of a Lexical Paradigm

Verbal Suppletion in Romance Synchrony and Diachrony: The Perspective of Distributed Morphology

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