Rolf Noyer: suppletion (reply to Carson Schutze)

[Martha McGinnis]

I'm new on the list, so I hope I don't incidentally violate some
netiquette rule by this rather long email.

(1) Romance offers, I think, some evidence that either suppletion
must be available on the root level or suppletion is a kind of
allomorphy:

French: aller 'to go'
Present:
         1sg:    va-is   1pl:    all-ons
         2sg:    va-s    2pl:    all-ez
         3sg:    va-     3pl:    v-ont
Future:
         1sg:    ir-ai   1pl:    ir-ons
         2sg:    ir-a-s  2pl:    ir-ez
         3sg:    ir-a-   3pl:    ir-ont
The rest of the paradigm is based on either all- (impairfait, simple
past, participles, subjunctive - the latter one based on an
allophone) or on -ir (present conditional only).
Imperative forms are identical to 2sg, 2pl, 1pl (as throughout French)

[There are other verbs that behave in a similar way (though not quite
as extremely):
         http://french.about.com/library/verb/bl_verb.htm
Importantly, many verbs single out 1pl and 2pl]

Maybe future and present conditional can be collapsed as some soft of
irrealis. What about va- forms?

Option 1: singular and 3pl present tense forms are special. Then what
functional morpheme can competition be about if these forms are
actually less specified (either [-pl] or [-person])?

Option 2: all- forms are special. I have no idea what 1pl, 2pl,
infinitive, simple past, etc., have in common. At any rate, it would
be weird to call most of the paradigm a special case.

So a priori, suppletion is root level in Romance.

However, there's one more option:
Option 3: there are two all-: one for the present tense, encoding
[+person, +number] and the other for everything else not encoded by
ir-. It's not that crazy, because other verbs do not go quite to the
same extremes as aller.

NB: I'm not sure I completely understand what [+person] would mean as
a feature, given that [+1] and [+2] seem to be required (evidence:
exclusive [1pl] and inclusive [1,2pl] plurals), but whatever.

But then we get strong evidence that suppletion is an extreme form of
allomorphy because 1pl and 2pl are very often special cases for
*allomorphs* in French (e.g. with the verb mourir 'die'). (This point
does not seem to depend directly on whether stem suppletion is
available or not, I don't think)

I don't know if such multiple allomorph/suppletion cases EVER fill
out totally random cells of the paradigm (e.g. Nominative dual and
Locative singular only).

(2) Re Carson's original examples, I don't know how much it is
possible to tell from pairs that are different in one feature (as it
would seem to me (strictly on the basis of the given pairs) that in
SLQZ, one could say that habituals are special (the case (k) may be
even more special) - the prediction then being that imperfective
non-habituals (progressives) pattern with perfectives. I suspect the
rest of Carson's cases could also be taken to argue for suppletion of
a functional morpheme.

(3) Re Rolf's BLURK and SNORP: it seems to me that these are more an
issue of what are possible meanings of morphemes (presumably not "to
chop down a small cactus" or "to chop down a single cactus"; nor can
there be a tense form meaning "on last Tuesday" or "before sunset").
So doesn't the range of meanings need to be restricted in any theory
of the lexicon?

On the other hand, it seems to me that the learnability issue would
restrict suppletion (or any other kind of irregularity) to a finite
number of items, and then it's no longer important if there are 50 or
100 of them or what they mean (within the range of allowed meanings)
- as long as it's a reasonably learnable number. The standard view of
Russian perfective formation claims that which prefix (of about 20)
is used to form the default perfective of a given verb (perfectives
are (usually) formed from imperfective stems by adding a prefix -
some perfectives have a special meaning (e.g. "to run OVER",
"run-ON"), but there's usually one that just makes *that* verb
perfective (e.g. "run-PERF") - that's the default one) is an
idiosyncratic property of that verb. If kids can learn this, evem 500
suppletive stems cannot be a problem :)

(I must add here that I'm not at all sure that this standard view is
correct, nonetheless I don't know of any better hypothesis.)

So my conclusion would be that, yeah, some meanings are not possible
as suppletive items - nor are they possible as any kind of a lexical
item, and there are some generalizations to be established (e.g. "a
morpheme cannot collapse the meanings of non-light verbs", or
something like this - I'm not claiming this is true, just noting
things better be constrained in these ways as well). It's an
extremely interesting question (what's "natural"? why are some
meanings good as adjectives and others aren't?), but I don't think
it's special to suppletion.

Finally, Carson's "pueblo" example, I think it's just "village" and
it's us who call it a pueblo for our own reasons.

O