Rolf Noyer: suppletion (reply to Carson Schutze)

[Martha McGinnis]

Hello DMers,
as author of what Carson quoted in respect to suppletion I thought I should
pop in here. I think this is an excellent question to investigate, and, in
fact, I did think some about this problem a few years ago, but not much
recently.

It's not always clear what counts as a set of suppletive alternants. For
example, are "moon" and "lun-" (as in "lunar") related derivationally?
(Same thing for sun/solar, fox/vulpine, bear/ursine etc. etc.)  On what
grounds can one decide? The same question might be asked in connection with
some of the examples Carson brought up.

In trying to understand this issue I think it's important to keep in mind
why (I think ...) Alec advanced this hypothesis to begin with.  (Alec
please correct my memory if I'm off base.)  The problem of suppletion is a
problem for learnability.  Suppose you're the learner and you hear BLURK in
some contexts and SNORP in others.  Suppose that in the target language
BLURK is the singular allomorph stem and SNORP is the plural allomorph
stem, and the verb BLURK/SNORP means "to chop down a cactus."  In the
absence of negative evidence, it's going to be hard for the child to
determine that what's different about BLURK and SNORP is simply their
morphosyntactic distribution and not, say, the fact that they refer to
different types of cactuses being cut down.  The child might well conclude
that BLURK means "cut down a short stubby cactus" and SNORP means "cut down
a long thin cactus."  If the semantic "slot" for the encyclopedia entry for
BLURK/SNORP is somehow pre-given then the child has some assistance here,
since then the problem of trying to exclude the extraneous aspects of the
context of utterance from the essentials in the meaning of BLURK/SNORP is
greatly simplified. From an historical perspective, one might ask: why
doesn't suppletion die instantly?

We have to compare this to a different situation where the alternants are
BLURK/BLARK. Here the inference that BLARKing is the same thing as BLURKing
is easier to make in view of the phonological similarity of the alternants.

The real question, to my mind, is how much help does the learner need in
solving this kind of "double variable equation"?  Alec's idea is the
strongest (therefore most interesting) hypothesis: it says that the child
needs to know that variable X is drawn from some limited (pre-given) set,
whenever Y (the phonological relationship between the allomorphs) is
completely unrestricted.  When Y is restricted by the property of
"sufficient" phonological resemblance, then X need not be drawn from any
pregiven set.  It is easy to imagine that the strongest form of this
hypothesis does not hold, but the basic question remains the same.

I think it would be useful to discuss what all this means and whether what
I have said above is in fact an accurate portrayal of the motivation for
the hypotheses on restricting suppletion.

If I am correct that the motivation comes from some notions about
learnability, then a logically feasible alternative is that the
encyclopedia entries for roots whose vocabulary items are suppletive must
be somehow "at core" composed of "natural concepts" the learning of which
is greatly aided in some fashion by human cognitive structure.  In other
words, roots which have suppletive alternants ought not to be defined by
highly culture-specific properties or concepts.  This of course could be
wrong (Carson's "pueblo" example, if correctly glossed, might be a
candidate for something of this sort).

The question of course ought to be an empirical one.  If one could show
that there was in fact a close correlation between frequency and suppletion
then there might be support for the idea that suppletion is just "extreme
allomorphy" which the learner is happy to acquire given sufficiently
frequent exposure.  But I don't know of anyone who has demonstrated that.

--Rolf