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

Abstract

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.

Language Use and Linguistic Structure: Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2021

“…Romance theme elements (along with φ-features) are considered to be the result of a well-formedness condition on syntactic functional heads (Oltra- Massuet 1999, Arregi 2000, Pomino 2008, Pomino and Remberger 2019. More specifically, they are adjoined to little v via a node-insertion process (e.g., "node sprouting", Choi and Harley 2019).…”

“…Apart from the fact that the arguments in are somehow circular, 12 his analysis is not applicable to French go suppletion. However, other post-syntactic processes, such as Fusion, for example, also seem incorrect for the analysis of French go suppletion, since locality restrictions on allomorphy are not met (but see Pomino and Remberger 2019). What is more, Fusion and Pruning can be avoided if VI is not limited to terminal elements, as in the non-terminal spell-out of Nanosyntax (cf.…”

“…The suppletion found with French aller is especially interesting (cf. also Pomino and Remberger 2019) since the respective forms have their origins in verbs from different Latin CCs, i.e. some forms of aller are thematic and others are athematic.…”