A monoradical approach to some cases of disuppletion

Abstract

This paper, a commentary on Harley 2014, explores cases of disuppletive roots, such as destroy/destruct, persons/people, and worse/badder, the predominant approach to which is to assume that these come from different roots. We adopt a monoradical approach to such cases, claiming that they always involve the same root, but that the suppletive allomorphy is conditioned by the presence or absence of additional functional heads in the structure. We also posit that defective verbs in Spanish, an extreme case of disuppletion (whereby one of the exponents of this root is ineffable), receive a straightforward analysis as a case of contextually limited allomorphy, following Harley's postulate that certain formatives may have no elsewhere item on either the LF or the PF side (the Encyclopedic List and the Exponent List, respectively).Keywords: roots, allomorphy, suppletion, late insertion, pluralia tantum nouns, comparative suppletion, backformation, defective verbs, paradigm gaps The construction of rootsHeidi Harley's paper 'On the identity of roots' (2014) presents a convincing and comprehensive analysis of allomorphy and allosemy in verbal roots that demonstrates that the acategorial roots of Distributed Morphology (and potentially any realizational theory of morphology that attempts decomposition based on crosslinguistic and psycholinguistic evidence) are abstract indices, bearing neither dedicated phonological nor interpretive form, both of these being contextually determined. As such the account provides even fuller teeth to the Distributed Morphology (DM) notion of separate lists, wherein the Formative List (List 1), the Exponent List (List 2), and the Encyclopedic List (List 3) are wholly distinct, and Karlos Arregi:

Phonological regularities among defective verbs

“…more specifically, suppose that verbs, as open-class lexical items, are represented in the syntax by a root lacking phonological content, call it √abl43 (a notion adopted in Harley 2014). In Arregi & Nevins (2014), it was proposed that the arrangement of vocabulary entries would be as follows for defective verbs such as abolir in spanish and Portuguese:…”

Verbal Suppletion in Romance Synchrony and Diachrony: The Perspective of Distributed Morphology

“…A very interesting notion in this context is the term ‘disuppletion', cf. Arregi & Nevins (), which exactly refers to this kind of morphological defectiveness: differently from our case of go, a highly frequent verb, disuppletion occurs when a defective paradigm is not repaired by suppletive stems.…”

Exponence, allomorphy and haplology in the number and State morphology of Modern Hebrew

“…22 How exactly pluralia tantum nouns may be modeled while still having the plural exponent realize a plural feature is a separate question. It is dealt with, for instance, in Arregi and Nevins (2014).…”