Suppletion Replication in Grammaticalization and Its Triggering Factors

Abstract

The paper tries to account for several instances of emerging suppletion by establishing a cross-linguistic tendency of suppletion replication in grammaticalization. It can be shown that words which acquire new grammatical functions and therefore enter a different class of lexemes tend to copy suppletion patterns already present in other members of this class. This development can be triggered by factors of different nature, either internal to the language in question or rooted in contact between different languages or dialects of the same language. The suppletion replication tendency is demonstrated on several cases of grammaticalization of demonstrative or relative pronouns into 3rd person pronouns. This typologically common development is known to have led to the creation of new suppletion in several languages of Europe. In the present paper, three particularly telling cases from Slavonic, dialects of Lithuanian and early West Germanic dialects spoken on the continent are discussed in detail.

Inflectional Suppletion and Heteroclite Inflection from a Diachronic Perspective

“…It follows that the case of Russian ‘run’, if taken into consideration, supports neither the hypothesis of a complete synonymy or a hyponymy ~ hyperonymy relation as a necessary precondition for inflectional suppletion (Maiden ; Hill ), nor the more general assumption of an asymmetry between a more general and a more specific meaning (Börjars & Vincent : 262–3).…”

“…The specific questions (b') and (b'') above have been addressed in Maiden (), Hippisley et al. (), Hill (), and Plank (2016a, 2016b: 704–6). There is no doubt that the distribution of constituents in an inflectional paradigm can change over time.…”

“…It may arise (a) in the course of changes affecting the sound system of the relevant language (see recently Mel’čuk 2000: 520; Corbett 2007: 13; Kim 2016; Plank 2016a: 2–4), or (b) in the course of grammaticalisation of a derivational pattern which, while acquiring a new grammatical function, becomes obligatory for each lexeme belonging to the relevant part of speech (cf. recently Hill 2015: 54–55).…”

“…A search of the whole recorded history of German yields five cases of emerging (nearly) canonical inflectional suppletion with a pre‐suppletion starting point either directly documented in texts or reliably inferred from closely related Germanic languages. Two of them are found in the inflection of the personal pronouns ‘he, she’ (see most recently Hill 2015: 63–9), one in the present tense of ‘be’ (Hill 2015: 55–6, with further references), and two in the inflection of ‘go, walk’ and ‘stand’ (Nübling 2000: 206, 300–4). All other cases of canonical inflectional suppletion in German (such as ich ~ mir ) have counterparts in all of Germanic and are, in a similar form, also found in more remotely related Indo‐European languages (including Sanskrit).…”

Suppletion: Questions for History and Theory

“…By contrast, Bobaljik (2002: 67), a leading exponent of Distributed Morphology (DM), has claimed that 'DM, with Impoverishment rules, can account for the appearance of paradigm structure, without positing that that structure is itself a part of linguistic knowledge', and he concludes another case study with the assertion that within DM reference to a word's paradigm 'is neither needed nor possible' (Bobaljik 2008: 54). At the same time, he is a strong advocate of the data yielded by suppletion as a source of theoretical insight rather than a morphological dumping ground (Bobaljik 2012;2015). In particular, suppletion is argued to provide evidence for two central claims of DM, namely hierarchical structure and locality, both in turn based on the notion of the morpheme as a minimal unit of linguistic organisation.…”