Carson Schutze: suppletion

[Martha McGinnis]

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