suppletion

[Elena A. Arkhipova]

To Frank. Y. Gladney:
Well, the very fact that in Rusian soft and hard consonants are phonemes 
means that these sounds have a distinguishing function. So for Russian 
people /sosed/ and /sosed'/ (if existed) would be different words anyway. 
Compare /mat/ and /m'at/ and /mat'/, those are three different words, and 
this is just the very first example coming to my mind.
As to "vremja", there is a special paradigm for all the words alike, and 
it's quite normal for Russian people as well. The same is about "stremja", 
"plemja", "semja" (I'm trying to transliterate "semen" here) etc. So as 
there is a system, even though there are not so many words for this 
sub-stem, people find it easy to consider a root change a bit, almost the 
same as "begu" - "bezhish"; as to linguists, we find the historical 
processes led to this change of the same importance as ones led to "g"/"zh" 
or "k"-"ch" alternation.
I hope it's of any help.
Best regards,
Elena.


Elena A. Arkhipova, PhD, MBA
Chair of Department of
Russian as a Foreign Language,
Program Coordinator
Nevsky Institute of  Language and Culture
27 Bolshaya Raznochinnaya
St. Petersburg, 197110, Russia
tel./fax: +7 812 230 36 98

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <gladney at ILLINOIS.EDU>
To: <SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 8:51 PM
Subject: [SEELANGS] suppletion


> It's a question of whether /och/ is related to /ok/ and /sosed'/ to 
> /sosed/ phonologically. Say phonology effects changes like A → B in 
> environment C.  Do B and C have to be phonetically similar?  If yes, then 
> /sosed/ showing up as /sosed'/ before the loc. pl. ending /ax/ is not a 
> matter of phonology, and /sosed'/ and /sosed/ are suppletive lexical 
> entries, just like /reben#k/ and /det'/.  And yet... the former pair 
> differs by a single feature, the second is clearly two different words. 
> Supppletion has two aspects which need to be distinguished.  One is 
> deponence (defective distribution): _loquor_ 'I speak' doesn't occur in 
> the active voice or _ditja_ much in the singular.  The other is what 
> speakers do to compensate for it.  Russian speakers use /reben#k/ in the 
> singular, and inhibited from saying either _pobezhu_ or _pobezhdu_ for 'I 
> will conquer', they resort to _ja oderzu pobedu_, _ja budu pobeditelem_, 
> or some such.  This is suppletion because paradigm gaps are being!
>  filled.  But /reben#k/ and  _oderzu pobedu_,  etc. can't be considered 
> members of the /det'/ and /pobedi/ paradigms.  Then there's the matter of 
> stem extensions.  Is _vremja_ suppletive?  Yes if you follow Jakobson in 
> analyzing this form as /vr'em'+o/, because this form would have a 
> different stem from _vremeni_, _vremena_, etc.  No if _vremja_ is analyzed 
> as /vremen+Ø/, since all members of the paradigm would then share a stem. 
> Ukr. _ljudyna_ and _ljudy_ share a root.  But the (non)appearance of the 
> suffix /yn/ is not phonology, so this is suppletion.  Comments welcome.
>
> Frank Y. Gladney
>
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