Event

Fellow-linguists -- Next Wednesday, Nov. 7, Ronald Kim will be giving a talk at 11 a.m. in the Linguistics library.  The abstract is below.  Hope to see you there.  --Don Ringe “The multiple origins of suppletion: paradigmatic merger and sound change” Ronald I. Kim (Poznań/Prague) Suppletion is typically conceived of in diachronic terms as a discontinuous phenomenon, by which two or more originally distinct lexical items with full, regular paradigms come to share slots in a single paradigm.However, it has long been known among historical linguists that the regular sound change acting undisturbed over long periods of time can in fact give rise to what in synchronic terms must be considered suppletive stem relationships.It is proposed, primarily on the basis of examples from Indo-European languages, that instances of suppletion with a morphologically unmotivated or “random” distribution are more likely to have arisen internally by the accretion of sound change than those which contrast neatly defined categories such as “singular” vs. “plural”.Supporting this view is the phonological origin of several well-known cases of morphomic alternations, which can serve as a gateway for the introduction of suppletive stems.However, this hypothesis is to be understood only as a general tendency, since the distribution of stems may be altered by irregular morphological developments.