Patterns of suppletion in inflection revisited
-
Frans Plank
Abstract
Examining the distribution of suppletive stems over inflectional paradigms, a constraint on their complexity, call it Crossover Constraint, is shown to be untenable. There are paradigms, in some languages at some stage of their development, where suppletive distributions are maximally complex — like one stem of a verb being used for 1st Person Singular and 3rd Person Plural and another stem for all other person and number forms, which in terms of paradigm geometry is a crossover distribution. Rather than unceremoniously dumping this universal it is argued that constraints on states must be distinguished from constraints on transitions. There are two main routes to suppletion, the harnessing of distinct stems for one lexeme and the phonological separation of once unitary stems; their respective results are synchronically indistinguishable. When stems are combined, they will divide up paradigms in ways that follow morphological patterns, which outlaws crossovers, while phonological differentiations are under no obligation to respect morphological groundplans.
Abstract
Examining the distribution of suppletive stems over inflectional paradigms, a constraint on their complexity, call it Crossover Constraint, is shown to be untenable. There are paradigms, in some languages at some stage of their development, where suppletive distributions are maximally complex — like one stem of a verb being used for 1st Person Singular and 3rd Person Plural and another stem for all other person and number forms, which in terms of paradigm geometry is a crossover distribution. Rather than unceremoniously dumping this universal it is argued that constraints on states must be distinguished from constraints on transitions. There are two main routes to suppletion, the harnessing of distinct stems for one lexeme and the phonological separation of once unitary stems; their respective results are synchronically indistinguishable. When stems are combined, they will divide up paradigms in ways that follow morphological patterns, which outlaws crossovers, while phonological differentiations are under no obligation to respect morphological groundplans.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Resurrecting rhymes, reasons and (no) rhotics 5
- Diachronic phonology with Contrastive Hierarchy Theory 20
- The life cycle of phonological patterns explains drift in sound change 35
- The diachronic typology of retroflex vowels 50
- Diachronic shifts among sound ideophones 62
- The classification of the Plains Algonquian languages 79
- Modelling combined linguistic and non-linguistic evidence in language reconstruction 94
- Dissimilatory constraints discriminate between variants in analogical change 110
- Patterns of suppletion in inflection revisited 128
- Differential object marking in early Italo-Romance and old Sardinian 150
- Semantic factors in case loss 166
- Morphosyntactic borrowing in closely related varieties 184
- Nominal privative suffixes as a diachronic source of verbal negative markers 198
- The emergence of oblique subjects 215
- Grammaticalization of sentence adverbs and modal particles revisited 232
- A discourse analysis of left-dislocation in Old English 249
- The semantics of word borrowing in late medieval English 263
- Approximative adverbs in modern and pre-modern languages 279
- The history of numerals as a history of East African languages 294
- Language index 307
- Subject index 309
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Resurrecting rhymes, reasons and (no) rhotics 5
- Diachronic phonology with Contrastive Hierarchy Theory 20
- The life cycle of phonological patterns explains drift in sound change 35
- The diachronic typology of retroflex vowels 50
- Diachronic shifts among sound ideophones 62
- The classification of the Plains Algonquian languages 79
- Modelling combined linguistic and non-linguistic evidence in language reconstruction 94
- Dissimilatory constraints discriminate between variants in analogical change 110
- Patterns of suppletion in inflection revisited 128
- Differential object marking in early Italo-Romance and old Sardinian 150
- Semantic factors in case loss 166
- Morphosyntactic borrowing in closely related varieties 184
- Nominal privative suffixes as a diachronic source of verbal negative markers 198
- The emergence of oblique subjects 215
- Grammaticalization of sentence adverbs and modal particles revisited 232
- A discourse analysis of left-dislocation in Old English 249
- The semantics of word borrowing in late medieval English 263
- Approximative adverbs in modern and pre-modern languages 279
- The history of numerals as a history of East African languages 294
- Language index 307
- Subject index 309
