Heidi Harley: suppletion (reply to Carson Schutze)
Martha McGinnis
mcginnis at ucalgary.ca
Wed Dec 18 16:01:55 UTC 2002
Hi all --
Re Carson's suppletion observations: Rolf and I talked
about this a while ago, and he had some example
of suppletion in a verb from some language that meant
"dive", which we thought was an unlikely f-morpheme.
More recently, I've run across suppletion in Yaqui
verbs, suppleting for plural number of the subject or object
(which normally doesn't trigger any change in the
verb form). Most of them are pretty good candidates for
f-morphemes, but some maybe not; below is the set from
Dedrick and Casad (2000) and also, where
distinct from Molina, Shaul, and Valenzuela (1999).
I've put asterisks by the ones where the suppletion
is total, involving even the first phoneme of the word.
(Yaqui is Uto-Aztecan; I understand that these suppletions
for number are common across the language family; I'll
keep my eyes open for more. It should be easy to find
'em in Hopi, for instance.)
Verb Sg. Pl
(intr, supplete for # of subject)
*run vuite tenne
*walk weama rehte
*go weye kaate
arrive yepsa yaha
enter kivake kiimu
leave siime saka
*die muuke koko
*be located katek hooka
sit weche watte
*be sitting yehte hoote
*be standing weyek ha'abwek
*lie down vo'ote to'ote
*sleep over vo'e to'e
(tr, supplete for # of object)
*kill me'aa su'aa
*put yecha hoa
*pick up tovokta hahau
*carry toha weiya
bring kivacha kiima
I'm inclined to think that Carson's right
about the statistically conditioned nature
of suppletion merely making it coincidental
that most suppletion seems to be with 'light'
type elements; f-morphemes, if you will.
It does seem to me that the problem of suppletive
l-morphemes is a grave one. As carson outlined,
the original Halle/Marantz idea with pairs like
rise/raise was that some readjustment rule
applies to the actual phonological string that
the vocabulary item inserts and the encylopedia
entry indexes. Carson asks,
>
>... is it really any
>problem for DM to allow suppletion for "l-morphemes", i.e. any open-class
>vocabulary items? I gather that suppletion demands competition for
>insertion, and roots are not supposed to compete for insertion in general,
>but I've always been a little hazy on what would go wrong if roots did
>compete, and I'm particularly unclear on whether/why suppletion as a
>circumscribed kind of root competition is Bad. Is the former because we
>don't won't blocking among 'synonymous' roots? Is the latter not Evil,
but
>simply an add-on that we would not have expected given the overall
>architecture of the theory? In other words, can't DM incorporate these
facts
>just fine?
The way competition among l-morphemes would have to
work is that there would have to be an Ur-root,
say BAD (for bad/worse), which gets selected in the
numeration along with the other purely morphosyntactic
features. Then vocabulary insertion will insert
"bad" for BAD as an elsewhere case, and "worse"
for BAD as the case conditioned by comparatives.
(The Ur-morpheme I mention above is like the notion
of E-root proposed by Mark Volpe in a recent ms.)
(If you didn't have Ur-roots, "bad" would
be in competition with "good" and "smart" and
"big" etc.)
Now, proposing Ur-roots might not be an obviously
bad thing; it's basically saying that Fodor
is Right: we have all these (unanalyzable) concepts
floating around, and they get hooked up to
particular phonological strings. I don't have a problem
with that. The problem, as Rolf and I described
Alec's observation (I don't have Alec's original
ms. either, darnit, so have to rely on our description
of it from our Peeters volume paper), is this:
"In terms of learnability, as Marantz suggests,
given a space of universal conceptual primes,
the child can associate two phonologically
unrelated VIs with some cell in that space.
But without this pre-given structure, the
child has no way of determining that two
phonologically unrelated alternants do not
in fact denote two different sorts of objects
(or predicates)."
So it comes down to a question of acquisition: it's
crucially the regularity across environments
of the form/meaning relationship that lets you
asociate phonological shape "a" with concept
A. What happens if concept A is sometimes
realized with phonological shape "a" and sometimes
with phonological shape "b"? Shouldn't you
guess that "a" and "b", although very similar,
refer to different concepts? (How else can you
figure out that "wheat" and "oats" are different
concepts? The fact that they have different
names is a big clue, it seems to me). So
you'd end up with a situation where an English
learner thinks that "go" refers to concept A,
and "went" refers to concept B, and they happen
to get used in very similar circs (like "Doberman"
and "St. Bernard").
As I write this I think that maybe the solution
is not so hard after all. Suppletion occurs
when phonologically dissimilar strings refer
to the same concept in morphosyntactically
distinct contexts ([+past], [+compar], etc).
All the learner would have to do is figure out
that there is a 'paradigm gap' for a particular
phonological string/concept mapping --
he never hears 'went' in situations where the
present tense is present; he never hears
'go' in the past -- and then make the appropriate
association. Certainly we know that kids are
monstrous statistical machines; they keep track
of everything. let's say their first pass
conceptual mapping assigns 'go' to A and
'went' to B -- but that as they accumulate
stats on 'go' and 'went' over time, they
can notice that they are in complementary
distribution w/r to nonpast/past, and that
their conditions of use are otherwise
extemely similar. Having the ability to
noticing complementary distribution is
crucial for other purposes, right?
So the upshot of that idea would be that
suppletion can only be conditioned by
universal morphosyntactic features, kind
of the definition of suppletion, I suppose. You
shouldn't, then, see suppletion conditioned
by participation in an idiom, e.g., or
by cooccurence with 'dog' rather than 'horse'.
Of course, assuming that the numeration has
access to Ur-roots makes one think that
the morphosyntax (e.g. vocabulary insertion
of f-morphemes) *could* be conditioned by
the difference between 'dog' and 'horse' --
it's rather counter to the whole point of
Late Insertion. We'd have to come up with
another reason why the morphosyntax doesn't
pay attention to non-linguistic conceptual
differences, or else stipulate that Ur-roots
are inserted first, at vocabulary insertion,
and then competition for suppletion happens --
essentailly making suppletion a readjustment
rule too, which doesn't seem right.
Hmm. thoughts, anyone?
yrs musingly, hh
>-- Original Message --
>Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2002 08:58:48 -0700
>Reply-To: The Distributed Morphology List
> <DM-LIST at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
>From: Martha McGinnis <mcginnis at ucalgary.ca>
>Subject: Carson Schutze: suppletion
>To: DM-LIST at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>
>
>Greetings everyone,
>Things have been rather quiet on the list lately, and I'm avoiding my real
>work, so I thought I'd bring up a topic on which my colleagues recently
>provided me with some interesting data. The issue is suppletion, and the
>claim is the one summarized in the following passage, cut and pasted from
>the DM web site FAQ section.
>
>--------------
>Traditionally it is often thought that there is a gradient between
>suppletion and other types of more phonologically regular allomorphy, and
>that no reasonable grounds can be given for how to divide the two or if
they
>should be divided at all. Marantz 1997b has recently proposed that true
>suppletion occurs only for Vocabulary items in competition for f-morphemes,
>since competition occurs only for f-morphemes. An immediate consequence
>is
>that undeniably suppletive
>pairs like go/went or bad/worse must actually represent the spelling of
>f-morphemes. The class of f-morphemes is as a result considerably enriched,
>but since the class of f-morphemes is circumscribed by Universal Grammar,
>it
>is also predicted that true suppletion should be limited to universal
>syntactico-semantic categories. Moreover, given that some independent
>grounds might in this way divide suppletive from Readjustment-driven
>allomorphy, a theory of the range of possible Readjustment processes becomes
>more feasible.
>--------------
>
>What I'm interested in is the question of whether true suppletion really
>is
>limited to f-morphemes, given some independent notion of what the latter
>could be. When I've heard Alec talk about this (I don't have the 1997b
>manuscript cited above so I can't verify), the idea of what fits in this
>class seems to be close to light verbs (if we're talking about verbs),
e.g.,
>something whose meaning might be represented just with basic primitives.
>E.g., I think 'give' would fit the bill, conceived of something like 'x
>CAUSE y BE AT z'. [I've no desire to start a debate about lexical
>decomposition here, just trying to give what I understand to be the flavor
>of the claim.]
>
>Below are some data that I think throw this claim into question. If you
>agree (or if you don't then hypothetically speaking), is it really any
>problem for DM to allow suppletion for "l-morphemes", i.e. any open-class
>vocabulary items? I gather that suppletion demands competition for
>insertion, and roots are not supposed to compete for insertion in general,
>but I've always been a little hazy on what would go wrong if roots did
>compete, and I'm particularly unclear on whether/why suppletion as a
>circumscribed kind of root competition is Bad. Is the former because we
>don't won't blocking among 'synonymous' roots? Is the latter not Evil,
but
>simply an add-on that we would not have expected given the overall
>architecture of the theory? In other words, can't DM incorporate these
facts
>just fine?
>
>I'm willing to bet it is statistically true that *most* suppletion is found
>in semantically light words, but couldn't that just be an effect of
>frequency, viz. those are the words you hear most often, and something
needs
>to be heard pretty often in order for a suppletive form to be learned by
>successive generations?
>
>OK, the data. Here are some examples of what I think must be considered
true
>suppletion whose meanings strike me as not fitting the expanded notion
of
>f-morpheme in the quote above, i.e. cases where it seems we would need
root
>suppletion. I claim no knowledge of these languages myself, but field work
>on some of them is ongoing at UCLA so in some cases I could find out more.
>I
>do believe the orthographies are transparent enough that we can be confident
>in the lack of phonological similarity, but also the need for full
>suppletion is claimed by those working on the languages.
>
>(These languages also have suppletion for some 'light' verbs, which I
>haven't bothered to type in.)
>
>
>San Lucas Quiavini Zapotec (some diacritics omitted)
>---------------------------
>(1) Verbs
>a. plays-habitual: rgye'eht b. play-perfective: bzu'aht
>(the r- and b- prefixes are regular but nothing else is)
>
>c. vomits-habitual: reei'by d. vomit-perfective: guua'z
>(r- becoming gu- is regular)
>
>e. puts.on-habitual: ra'ahcw f. put.on-perfective: gwu'aht
>(e.g. 'put on a shirt')
>
>g. sees-habitual: raann h. see-perfective: mnnaa
>
>i. tells-habitual: re'ihpy j. tell-imperative: gwu'ahts
>
>k. sits.down-habitual: rbih l. sit.down-habitual-1pl: rzhu'enn
> (-enn is regular suffix)
>
>(2) Nouns
>a. clothes: laihdy b. clothes-poss: x:ahb
>(x:- is the regular prefix)
>c. field: loh nyaaa' d. field-poss: loh zhihah
>e. pueblo: guee'ihzh f. pueblo-poss: lahahzh:
>
>
>Ainu
>----
>(3) a. kill-sg.obj: rayke b. kill-pl.obj: ronnu
>
>Comanche
>--------
>(4) a. fly-sg: yItsI b. fly-pl: yoti
>
>Pima
>----
>(5) a. arrive-sg: jivia b.: arrive-pl: dada
>c. kill-sg: mua d.: kill-pl: kokda
>
>-Carson
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Heidi Harley
Department of Linguistics
Douglass 200E
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
Ph: (520) 626-3554
Fax: (520) 626-9014
hharley at u.arizona.edu
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