LINGUIST List 23.1266

Tue Mar 13 2012

Sum: Suppletion Cross-linguistically Responses

Editor for this issue: Zac Smith <zaclinguistlist.org>


Date: 12-Mar-2012
From: Piers Kelly <Piers.Kellyanu.edu.au>
Subject: Suppletion Cross-linguistically Responses
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Query for this summary posted in LINGUIST Issue: 23.1116 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 quickbackground:

My dissertation is on an auxiliary language of the Philippines calledEskayan which was created, according to folklore, by a pre-Hispanicancestor and rediscovered in the early 20th century by a Messianicrebel soldier. On the face of it, Eskayan is a fairly straightforwardrelexification of Cebuano, a language spoken widely in central andsouthern Philippines. So, in other words, for every lexeme in Cebuanothere is a corresponding lexeme encoded in Eskayan. This goes forverbal affixes and nominalising morphology too.

But this is an oversimplification. It turns out that many of the Eskayanverbs and nominalisations show what looks like suppletion. In effect,these are words that are relexifications of Cebuano terms but withanalysable/unsegmentable morphology.Eg, the Cebuano realis perfective affix mi- is encoded in Eskayan aschdin-. But in some realis-perfective Eskayan forms, this morphologycannot be detected or analysed – it is simply understood byconvention. Eg, the Eskayan word bintaal corresponds to Visayanmigamit (‘used’). No part of the word bintaal can shown to be doing theinflection. This happens all over the place and not just in commonverbs.

Eskayan is mostly a written language and has its own traditionalliterature which I’ve been using as a corpus. I wanted to get a sense ofhow suppletive Eskayan really was in relation to other languages. I ammaking the argument that Eskayan is a reflection of what it's creatorunderstood languages to be like. It looks like he wanted to bring insuppletion 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 quantifysuppletions, treating it as a sliding scale of canonicity.

• Several of you suggested looking at the work of LlubjaVeselinova, including her PhD dissertation which later appeared asVeselinova, L (2006) Suppletion in verb paradigms. John Benjamins. ;and to: Veselinova, L. (2011). Suppletion According to Tense andAspect. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The WorldAtlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck DigitalLibrary, capítulo 79, Map 79; Veselinova, L (2011) Verbal Number andSuppletion. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) TheWorld Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck DigitalLibrary, Map 80

• Calle Borstell pointed me towards these two theses: http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=1&pid=diva2:373138 andhttp://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=1&pid=diva2:373138, and the suppletion database from theSurrey 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 hadsome feedback on the nature of suppletion generally (reproducedbelow)

• Many of you provided examples of languages with lots ofsuppletion and I’ve included these below for reference.

Thanks again!

Piers

___James Crippen:Tlingit has suppletion of verb roots that has to be lexicallyspecified. In verbs of motion there is a distinction between themovement of a single entity and the movement of plural entitiesrepresented by different verb roots. This is despite the existence ofsingular versus plural marking in the agreement prefixes of the verb,which occurs with all verbs. So:

át x̱waagútá-t ÿu-x̱a-ÿa-√gútit-to pfv-1sg.subj-clf-√go.sg‘I went there’

át wutuwa.átá-t ÿu-tu-ÿa-√.átit-to pfv-1pl.subj-clf-√go.pl‘we went there’

But

x̱watáaÿu-x̱a-ÿa-√táapfv-1sg.subj-clf-√sleep‘I slept’

wutuwatáaÿu-tu-ÿa-√táapfv-1pl.subj-clf-√sleep‘we slept’

This suppletion also interacts with the noun classification systemwhich has its own system of suppletion. In Tlingit, like in otherNa-Dene languages, noun classes are expressed through the use ofdifferent verbs of handling, which is partly done with verb rootsuppletion and partly through different ‘qualifier’ prefixes. So averb of handling has one form for a small round object, another formfor a flat flexible object, and so forth. These different categoriesare partly expressed through suppletion of the verb root, and some ofthis suppletion is due to whether the verb describes a single entityor plural entities.

__Dear Piers,

I don't know if it helps you, there are a good couple of languages withverbs that show suppletion (or stem-alternation) according to thenumber (sing - plur) of the most affected participant (the patient). Ifound this phenomenon in the next languages: Georgian, Yurok,Southern Paiute, Ainu,Sandawe, Koasati and Sumerian. I can also giveyou the list of literature I used in collecting my examples, if you need it.

Hope it helps!

Best Regards:Bálint Tanos

__

Dear Piers,I am writing about your query to the Linguist List. Irish is a languagewith much suppletion. You will find many interesting details by lookingat the dissertation detailed at .Best wishes,AA__Dear Piers,

the Tibetan languages have a 'standard' suppletion of stems in thecase 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 theselabels really fit, but that should not be of much concern for you):

Classical Tibetan: I: 'gro, II: song, IV: songLhasa (written equivalent) I: 'gro, II: phyin, IV: songLadakhi I: cha, II: song; IV: song

In most varieties, this is the only suppletive form.Classical Tibetan has about 1450 verbs (doublets with spellingalternations not yet sorted out), the modern varieties usually maximal800 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-WestBodish 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.

BestBettina ZeislerUniversität TübingenDFG-project:A Valency Dictionary of Ladakhi Verbs

__Howdy, Piers,

You probably already have loads of responses already, but I thoughtthatI would mention that the Yuman language family of California is famousforits extensive use of suppletive verb forms -- I've often wondered howchildrenlearned the languages for so long, but now there is no way to observe,sinceall of the languages are moribund.

Navajo/Apache also has a number of different verb bases for use indifferentaspects -- this is a characteristic of the Athabaskan family generally,butsurface phonological changes make the differences appear moreextreme than theyare.

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 intypology.

That's an interesting question. I think it borders on discussions ofcomplexity in general, or at least has some of the same methodologicalconcerns: is it really practical to count how many such forms alanguage has?Here's some info on an upcoming conference (including two relevantreference 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 asan alternate.)

In my personal opinion, ''suppletion'' is a misused term (not by you, butin general). It basically means ''it's weird, and we don't know''.Suppletionoften refers to several types, as long as each type is itselfunusual or unexplained by normal means. And it's used differently bydifferent researchers.

For example, one analysis (presented in one of my linguistics classes,''Typology'' actually) claimed a case of suppletion in Arabic. Arabicnouns and adjectives take a final /-a/ suffix in the feminine form, atleast 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-/ whenany material is added after it. To skip the details, I'll just say that thiscan be based on register (very formal Arabic pronounces this moreoften) and is obligatory when the noun/adjective is followed by certaincase markers (which also are only used in a high register), and apossessive ending (which is not necessarily formal) also makes itappear.So to make this explicit:sadiiq = friend.MASCsadiiq-a = friend.FEMsadiiq-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'tbe the underlying form either, because other words ending in /-at/ don'tlose 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 (almostalways overlaps with the [feminine] feature) for this. There's really noother way around it. You could alternatively claim some sort ofcomplicated morphology where this particular morpheme has its ownphonological rules, I suppose. Either way, suppletion was a lot lessexplanatory than a real answer, whatever that may be (or howeverhard it may be to figure out).

In the case of canonical suppletion like go/went, I think you'll probablyfind 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 studiedabout 12 languages (not that I'm fluent in them) and each has somesuppletive forms, or just ''irregular verbs''. They're called differentthings, like ''stem changing verbs'' (Spanish) or ''strong verbs''(German), etc. Something that is very interesting, though, is that thesearen't just random-- a lot of the forms can be somewhat predicted.Consider the English verbs quit/hit or rise/ride (which have parallel pasttense forms), or perhaps even buy/bring => bought/brought. Which ofthese is ''suppletive'' or ''irregular''?

An old idea I've always found intriguing is from Pānini (if you want acitation I can find one, but it's fairly well known), stating basically thatthere are no exceptions. Instead, there are just many rules, some ofwhich apply more specifically than others. So the past tense for allEnglish verbs is -ed, but for a few there's another rule of changing thestem vowel to -o- from -i-, or whatever it may be. And we get a few oddcases of lexical items that just have their own rule, eat=>ate. Looking atit that way, suppletion is even less clear: is it just the times when a ruleisn'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. InIndo-European languages they often come from two original systems,one of vowel change (umlaut, etc) and another with a suffix. Theseboth survived in the Germanic languages at least, and to some minorextent (just echoes) in Latin. Other irregularities come from innovationsand sound changes, such as in Spanish when only an unstressedvowel become a diphthong, so the infinitive remained as it was, but theconjugated 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 apretty strict root-and-pattern system, but not everything is predictable(such as what vowels may fill the patterns), and there are probablysome exceptions, not that I can cite them at the moment.Japanese is pretty regular, but a couple verbs have unpredictableparticiples, etc.Swahili is incredibly regular, with almost no exceptions. But at least theverb ''to be'' in the present tense is randomly a different form, ''ni''which doesn't vary by person or number, and none of the normalaffixes attach to it. And several other verbs have their own uniqueproperties, although I'd submit Swahili as an example of a languagewith almost no irregularity outside the most common verbs. (Lots ofaffixes 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 guaranteedthat in at least 9/10 it will be irregular. In fact, I don't know of a singlecase where there isn't something odd with that verb. Swedish comesclose to regularity, with är in the present tense for all persons andnumbers (verbs don't agree in Swedish), but that's irrelevant when youconsider the infinitive 'vara', etc.In fact, aside from analogy (eg, ''copywrote''?) infrequent words shouldnever 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? Thereare other topics too.

But to attempt an answer to your question, I think English is probablygoing to be a ''very irregular'' language, at least when compared tomost languages in the world (that it will be somewhat near the top).The reason is simple: English is in an odd place between logicalmorphology and isolating words. You probably won't find muchirregularity in an agglutinative language because it can't afford theextra uncertainty-- with that many affixes, everything needs to beregular or it won't be retained (and this is more true for polysyntheticlanguages). And in the case of an isolating language (Chinese forexample) irregularity doesn't seem to hold much meaning, since mostwords don't change shape. I suppose you could have a language thathas no morphology aside from suppletion, but I don't know of anythingquite like that. Right in the middle we get inflectional or fusionallanguages like English, Latin, etc., but specifically at the English end(toward isolating, away from agglutination) is where you're likely to finda mess of morphology... again, just my instincts on that one (but true asfar 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 (therehas been a lot done) because that can show you how to extractpatterns from a seemingly random system. There isn't anything thatthorough for English, at least nothing I've seen.

For historical data, nothing will be better than the development of theRomance languages from Vulgar Latin. A lot has been written aboutSpanish (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 toClassical Latin) and figure out why there are now irregular forms.Analyses of other languages exist, but the historical records are justmuch better for these languages than others. (Maybe if you wanted tolook 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 itor some examples of the data-- I'd be happy to try to think of a similarcase in another language that I've seen.

Daniel

__Hi Piers,

My response was quite long, but you're welcome to share it. Oneinteresting point that I thought of since I last emailed was that there ispartialsuppletion (unexplained morphemes, spelling changes, etc.), andalso complete suppletion, such as go->went. On that topic, I think youmight find the verb ''to go'' interesting in the Romance languages. Ineach, 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 Ireally have no idea what that is or what is meant, if it existed (althoughit did come from somewhere, surely). I don't know of too many verbsthat have completely irregular forms, though.

Have you found mostly irregularities within the mostly regular system orhave you found some completely irregular forms? In that case, fromwhat I know, those tend to be just two verbs collapsing.

For example, ''wend'' apparently is an old verb in English, with a pasttense ''went''. It means to walk/wander, or something like that. Andthat'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 whenyou get a chance. My area is definitely not the languages you'restudying, so I probably won't follow all of the details, but I'm sure I'll findthe basics interesting.

Good luck,Daniel Linguistic Field(s): Morphology                             Translation

Page Updated: 13-Mar-2012