suppletion

[gladney at ILLINOIS.EDU]

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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