We examine the notion of '(inflectional) periphrasis' within the framework of Canonical Typology, and argue that the canonical approach allows us to define a logically coherent notion of periphrasis. We propose a set of canonical criteria for inflectional morphology and a set of canonical criteria for functional syntax, that is, syntactic constructions which include functional elements and which express grammatical features. We argue that canonical periphrasis is exemplified in our theoretical space of possibilities whenever a cell in a (canonically morphological) inflectional paradigm ('feature intersection') is expressed by a multiword construction which respects the canonical properties of functional syntax. We compare our canonically-based approach with the approach of other authors, notably, Ackerman & Stump (2004), who argue for three sufficient conditions for a construction to be regarded as periphrastic: feature intersection, non-compositionality and distributed exponence. We argue that non-compositionality and distributed exponence, while sometimes diagnostic of periphrasis on a language-particular basis, do not constitute canonical properties of periphrasis. We also examine crucial but neglected syntactic aspects of periphrastic constructions: recursion of periphrases and headedness of periphrastic constructions. The approach we propose allows us to distinguish between constructions in actual languages which approximate the ideal of canonical periphrasis to various degrees without committing us to a categorical distinction between periphrastic and non-periphrastic constructions. At the same time we can capture the intuition that there is in some languages a distinct identifiable set of multiword constructions whose principal role is to realize grammatical features.

Suppletion is where the word-forms of the same lexeme have phonologically distinct stems. A study of thirty languages shows it to be surprisingly widespread, suggesting resistance to the pressure of paradigmatic levelling. While a major factor in its preservation appears to be the high frequency of the items that display it, two other factors are in operation, the type of inflectional category involved and the nature of the distribution of stems.

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This chapter presents novel data from the Nakh-Dagestanian language Archi illustrating a typologically unusual phenomenon of apparent agreement between first person pronouns and absolutive-marked arguments. Apart from their typological significance, these facts challenge current approaches to agreement, which hold that Agree relations can be established only between heads and phrases. The chapter shows that Archi agreeing pronouns do not constitute a uniform class, but subdivide into simple weak pronouns and complex forms composed of a pronoun and a focus marker. Weak pronouns lack [CL] feature specification ([øCL]), and must therefore copy a class feature from the closest v to avoid violating the constraint that all DPs must be specified for [CL]. As a result, the apparent agreement between arguments can be reduced to the unsurprising agreement between the absolutive DP and a series of verbal heads, some of them morphologically null.

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