Summary Details
| Query: |
Suppletion Cross-linguistically Responses
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| Author: | Piers Kelly | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Morphology
Translation |
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| Summary: |
Hi all,
Many thanks for taking the time to respond to my query on suppletion. This email is my attempt to summarise the responses. Some quick background: My dissertation is on an auxiliary language of the Philippines called Eskayan which was created, according to folklore, by a pre-Hispanic ancestor and rediscovered in the early 20th century by a Messianic rebel soldier. On the face of it, Eskayan is a fairly straightforward relexification of Cebuano, a language spoken widely in central and southern Philippines. So, in other words, for every lexeme in Cebuano there is a corresponding lexeme encoded in Eskayan. This goes for verbal affixes and nominalising morphology too. But this is an oversimplification. It turns out that many of the Eskayan verbs and nominalisations show what looks like suppletion. In effect, these are words that are relexifications of Cebuano terms but with analysable/unsegmentable morphology. Eg, the Cebuano realis perfective affix mi- is encoded in Eskayan as chdin-. But in some realis-perfective Eskayan forms, this morphology cannot be detected or analysed ��� it is simply understood by convention. Eg, the Eskayan word bintaal corresponds to Visayan migamit (���used���). No part of the word bintaal can shown to be doing the inflection. This happens all over the place and not just in common verbs. Eskayan is mostly a written language and has its own traditional literature which I���ve been using as a corpus. I wanted to get a sense of how suppletive Eskayan really was in relation to other languages. I am making the argument that Eskayan is a reflection of what it's creator understood languages to be like. It looks like he wanted to bring in suppletion to represent irregularity as a descriptive fact about (his) language. Summary of responses: ��� Anie Thompson suggested looking at Corbett 2007 (http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/1313/) who discusses how to quantify suppletions, treating it as a sliding scale of canonicity. ��� Several of you suggested looking at the work of Llubja Veselinova, including her PhD dissertation which later appeared as Veselinova, L (2006) Suppletion in verb paradigms. John Benjamins. ; and to: Veselinova, L. (2011). Suppletion According to Tense and Aspect. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, cap��tulo 79, Map 79; Veselinova, L (2011) Verbal Number and Suppletion. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, Map 80 ��� Calle Borstell pointed me towards these two theses: http://su.diva- portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=1&pid=diva2:373138 and http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf? searchId=1&pid=diva2:373138, and the suppletion database from the Surrey morphology group: http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/ ��� Minna Persson pointed me to this: http://wals.info/chapter/21 ��� Daniel Ross, a grad student from the University of Illinois had some feedback on the nature of suppletion generally (reproduced below) ��� Many of you provided examples of languages with lots of suppletion and I���ve included these below for reference. Thanks again! Piers ___ James Crippen: Tlingit has suppletion of verb roots that has to be lexically specified. In verbs of motion there is a distinction between the movement of a single entity and the movement of plural entities represented by different verb roots. This is despite the existence of singular versus plural marking in the agreement prefixes of the verb, which occurs with all verbs. So: ��t x��waag��t ��-t ��u-x��a-��a-���g��t it-to pfv-1sg.subj-clf-���go.sg ���I went there��� ��t wutuwa.��t ��-t ��u-tu-��a-���.��t it-to pfv-1pl.subj-clf-���go.pl ���we went there��� But x��wat��a ��u-x��a-��a-���t��a pfv-1sg.subj-clf-���sleep ���I slept��� wutuwat��a ��u-tu-��a-���t��a pfv-1pl.subj-clf-���sleep ���we slept��� This suppletion also interacts with the noun classification system which has its own system of suppletion. In Tlingit, like in other Na-Dene languages, noun classes are expressed through the use of different verbs of handling, which is partly done with verb root suppletion and partly through different ���qualifier��� prefixes. So a verb of handling has one form for a small round object, another form for a flat flexible object, and so forth. These different categories are partly expressed through suppletion of the verb root, and some of this suppletion is due to whether the verb describes a single entity or plural entities. __ Dear Piers, I don't know if it helps you, there are a good couple of languages with verbs that show suppletion (or stem-alternation) according to the number (sing - plur) of the most affected participant (the patient). I found this phenomenon in the next languages: Georgian, Yurok, Southern Paiute, Ainu,Sandawe, Koasati and Sumerian. I can also give you the list of literature I used in collecting my examples, if you need it. Hope it helps! Best Regards: B��lint Tanos __ Dear Piers, I am writing about your query to the Linguist List. Irish is a language with much suppletion. You will find many interesting details by looking at the dissertation detailed at Best wishes, AA __ Dear Piers, the Tibetan languages have a 'standard' suppletion of stems in the case of the word go (I = the so-called 'present' or 'imperfective' stem, II: the so-called 'past' or 'perfective' stem, IV: the so-called 'imperative' stem; none of these labels really fit, but that should not be of much concern for you): Classical Tibetan: I: 'gro, II: song, IV: song Lhasa (written equivalent) I: 'gro, II: phyin, IV: song Ladakhi I: cha, II: song; IV: song In most varieties, this is the only suppletive form. Classical Tibetan has about 1450 verbs (doublets with spelling alternations not yet sorted out), the modern varieties usually maximal 800 to 900 verbs. Some varieties also have a suppletive stem IV for the verb 'come' I: yong/'ong, II: yong(s)/'ong(s), IV: shog some Amdo Tibetan varietieshave one or two more such verbs (please have a look at Roland Bielmeier 2004: ���Shafer���s proto-West Bodish hypothesis and the formation of the Tibetan verb paradigms���. In: Anju Saxena (ed.), Himalayan Languages. Past and present. (Trends in Linguistics, 149.) Berlin: Mouton: 395-412. Best Bettina Zeisler Universit��t T��bingen DFG-project: A Valency Dictionary of Ladakhi Verbs __ Howdy, Piers, You probably already have loads of responses already, but I thought that I would mention that the Yuman language family of California is famous for its extensive use of suppletive verb forms -- I've often wondered how children learned the languages for so long, but now there is no way to observe, since all of the languages are moribund. Navajo/Apache also has a number of different verb bases for use in different aspects -- this is a characteristic of the Athabaskan family generally, but surface phonological changes make the differences appear more extreme than they are. All best, Rudy Troike University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona USA ___ Hi Piers, I'm a graduate student at the University of Illinois with an interest in typology. That's an interesting question. I think it borders on discussions of complexity in general, or at least has some of the same methodological concerns: is it really practical to count how many such forms a language has? Here's some info on an upcoming conference (including two relevant reference works) that might be of interest to you: http://depts.washington.edu/lingconf/index.php (I'll be there, but probably not presenting, as my paper was selected as an alternate.) In my personal opinion, ''suppletion'' is a misused term (not by you, but in general). It basically means ''it's weird, and we don't know''. Suppletionoften refers to several types, as long as each type is itself unusual or unexplained by normal means. And it's used differently by different researchers. For example, one analysis (presented in one of my linguistics classes, ''Typology'' actually) claimed a case of suppletion in Arabic. Arabic nouns and adjectives take a final /-a/ suffix in the feminine form, at least they usually do. There are exceptions that are feminine without it, and some masculine words with it. It's probably something like 99% reliable, though, and it's entirely productive. The complexity enters in that this /-a/ magically becomes /-at-/ when any material is added after it. To skip the details, I'll just say that this can be based on register (very formal Arabic pronounces this more often) and is obligatory when the noun/adjective is followed by certain case markers (which also are only used in a high register), and a possessive ending (which is not necessarily formal) also makes it appear. So to make this explicit: sadiiq = friend.MASC sadiiq-a = friend.FEM sadiiq-at-ii = friend.FEM.1Spossessive - 'my [female] friend' So where did the /t/ come from? It certainly didn't just appear randomly. Other words ending in /-a/ don't get magical /t/ epenthesis. And it can't be the underlying form either, because other words ending in /-at/ don't lose the /t/ in most cases. This mystery lead some researchers to the conclusion that it must be ''suppletion'', or basically that they don't know what's going on. My argument for it is that there is a feature on certain words (almost always overlaps with the [feminine] feature) for this. There's really no other way around it. You could alternatively claim some sort of complicated morphology where this particular morpheme has its own phonological rules, I suppose. Either way, suppletion was a lot less explanatory than a real answer, whatever that may be (or however hard it may be to figure out). In the case of canonical suppletion like go/went, I think you'll probably find more about that just calling them ''irregular verbs''. But then comes the next problem: how are you defining (that is, limiting) suppletion? Are all irregular verbs suppletive? ride=>rode, read=>read, say=>says? As for answering your question about specific languages, I've studied about 12 languages (not that I'm fluent in them) and each has some suppletive forms, or just ''irregular verbs''. They're called different things, like ''stem changing verbs'' (Spanish) or ''strong verbs'' (German), etc. Something that is very interesting, though, is that these aren't just random-- a lot of the forms can be somewhat predicted. Consider the English verbs quit/hit or rise/ride (which have parallel past tense forms), or perhaps even buy/bring => bought/brought. Which of these is ''suppletive'' or ''irregular''? An old idea I've always found intriguing is from P��nini (if you want a citation I can find one, but it's fairly well known), stating basically that there are no exceptions. Instead, there are just many rules, some of which apply more specifically than others. So the past tense for all English verbs is -ed, but for a few there's another rule of changing the stem vowel to -o- from -i-, or whatever it may be. And we get a few odd cases of lexical items that just have their own rule, eat=>ate. Looking at it that way, suppletion is even less clear: is it just the times when a rule isn't universal in a language? Or when it's particularly infrequent? Getting back to the languages I mentioned, here are some thoughts: All languages I've seen have irregular verbs in one way or another. In Indo-European languages they often come from two original systems, one of vowel change (umlaut, etc) and another with a suffix. These both survived in the Germanic languages at least, and to some minor extent (just echoes) in Latin. Other irregularities come from innovations and sound changes, such as in Spanish when only an unstressed vowel become a diphthong, so the infinitive remained as it was, but the conjugated forms changed, such as ''pod-er'' (can.INF) and ''pued-o'' (can.1Spresent). Basque has layers of regularity (classes of verbs that work differently) and then the most common verbs (at least) that are irregular. Arabic has few irregular verbs in some sense because it follows a pretty strict root-and-pattern system, but not everything is predictable (such as what vowels may fill the patterns), and there are probably some exceptions, not that I can cite them at the moment. Japanese is pretty regular, but a couple verbs have unpredictable participles, etc. Swahili is incredibly regular, with almost no exceptions. But at least the verb ''to be'' in the present tense is randomly a different form, ''ni'' which doesn't vary by person or number, and none of the normal affixes attach to it. And several other verbs have their own unique properties, although I'd submit Swahili as an example of a language with almost no irregularity outside the most common verbs. (Lots of affixes to remember, but mostly regular usage.) There is a definite trend that irregular patterns are in common verbs. So if you look at ''to be'' across languages, you're almost guaranteed that in at least 9/10 it will be irregular. In fact, I don't know of a single case where there isn't something odd with that verb. Swedish comes close to regularity, with ��r in the present tense for all persons and numbers (verbs don't agree in Swedish), but that's irrelevant when you consider the infinitive 'vara', etc. In fact, aside from analogy (eg, ''copywrote''?) infrequent words should never be irregular (at least not for long)-- it just won't be preserved. And that's only verbs. What about plurals, or cases for nouns? There are other topics too. But to attempt an answer to your question, I think English is probably going to be a ''very irregular'' language, at least when compared to most languages in the world (that it will be somewhat near the top). The reason is simple: English is in an odd place between logical morphology and isolating words. You probably won't find much irregularity in an agglutinative language because it can't afford the extra uncertainty-- with that many affixes, everything needs to be regular or it won't be retained (and this is more true for polysynthetic languages). And in the case of an isolating language (Chinese for example) irregularity doesn't seem to hold much meaning, since most words don't change shape. I suppose you could have a language that has no morphology aside from suppletion, but I don't know of anything quite like that. Right in the middle we get inflectional or fusional languages like English, Latin, etc., but specifically at the English end (toward isolating, away from agglutination) is where you're likely to find a mess of morphology... again, just my instincts on that one (but true as far as I know). If you're interested in finding the rules within the chaos (or under it), then comparing to work done on German would be a good idea (there has been a lot done) because that can show you how to extract patterns from a seemingly random system. There isn't anything that thorough for English, at least nothing I've seen. For historical data, nothing will be better than the development of the Romance languages from Vulgar Latin. A lot has been written about Spanish (among others), and I'm actually taking a class about this now. We can trace all of the words back to Vulgar Latin (and many to Classical Latin) and figure out why there are now irregular forms. Analyses of other languages exist, but the historical records are just much better for these languages than others. (Maybe if you wanted to look at Sanskrit, or Greek you could find similarly detailed descriptions.) Again, I think you're asking an interesting question. I hope these (long) thoughts help you some. Let me know if you have other thoughts on it or some examples of the data-- I'd be happy to try to think of a similar case in another language that I've seen. Daniel __ Hi Piers, My response was quite long, but you're welcome to share it. One interesting point that I thought of since I last emailed was that there is partialsuppletion (unexplained morphemes, spelling changes, etc.), and also complete suppletion, such as go->went. On that topic, I think you might find the verb ''to go'' interesting in the Romance languages. In each, there is a weird mix of at least two verbs, usually an infinitive like ''ir'' (Spanish) or ''andare'' (Italian) and conjugated forms like ''voy''/''vado'', that appear to come from some earlier form *vadire, but I really have no idea what that is or what is meant, if it existed (although it did come from somewhere, surely). I don't know of too many verbs that have completely irregular forms, though. Have you found mostly irregularities within the mostly regular system or have you found some completely irregular forms? In that case, from what I know, those tend to be just two verbs collapsing. For example, ''wend'' apparently is an old verb in English, with a past tense ''went''. It means to walk/wander, or something like that. And that's where we got ''went'' for ''go''. There's also a really weird case in Latin: fero (1S.PRES), ferro (inf.), tuli (perf.), latus (past participle). (It means ''carry'', as in ''transfer''-- carry across.) Your research sounds interesting, so, sure, send me some info when you get a chance. My area is definitely not the languages you're studying, so I probably won't follow all of the details, but I'm sure I'll find the basics interesting. Good luck, Daniel |
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| LL Issue: | 23.1266 | |
| Date Posted: | 13-Mar-2012 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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