Breaking paradigms A typological study of nominal and adjectival suppletion. Ghazaleh Vafaeian Department of Linguistics M.A. Thesis 30 hp Typological Linguistics Autumn 2010 Supervisor: Ljuba Veselinova Examiner: Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm Breaking paradigms A typological study of nominal and adjectival suppletion. Ghazaleh Vafaeian Abstract Suppletion is a term used to describe the occurrence of unpredictable and irregular patterns. Although typological research has been devoted to verb suppletion, not as much attention has been given to suppletion in nominal and adjectival paradigms. The thesis presents the cross- linguistic distribution of nominal and adjectival suppletion. The lexical distribution as well as the features involved are presented. The results of nominal suppletion show that nouns referring to humans are most often suppletive, that number is the most common grammatical feature involved in nominal suppletion and that „child‟ is by far the most common noun to be suppletive cross-linguistically. The results on adjectival suppletion show that adjectival suppletion is well spread though not very common cross-linguistically. A study of 8 Semitic languages shows that „woman‟ versus „women‟ are stable suppletive forms in this language family. Keywords Nominal suppletion, adjectival suppletion, morphology, typology, the Semitic language family, relevance hierarchy, semantic, inflection, derivation, word-formation, frequency, economy. Table of contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................1 Abbreviation and presentation conventions ....................................2 Abbreviations ............................................................................................. 2 Phonetic symbols ....................................................................................... 2 Practical issues .......................................................................................... 3 1. Introduction ...............................................................................4 1.1 Outline ................................................................................................ 4 1.2 The purpose of this study ...................................................................... 4 1.3 Methodology ........................................................................................ 5 1.3.1 Samples used in the study ............................................................... 6 1.3.2 Other methodological issues ............................................................ 6 2. Previous studies .........................................................................7 2.1 Criteria for suppletion ............................................................................ 7 2.1.1 Uniqueness and phonological distance ............................................... 7 2.1.2 Inflectional versus derivational suppletion .......................................... 8 2.1.3 Corbett‟s criteria for inflectional suppletion ....................................... 11 2.2 Frequency and irregular nouns .............................................................. 15 2.3 Verbal suppletion ................................................................................. 16 2.4 Motivations for suppletion suggested in the literature ............................... 16 2.5 Possession and kinship terms ................................................................ 19 3. Defining suppletion in this study ............................................... 20 3.1 Non-inflectional suppletion .................................................................... 22 3.1.1 Tlingit: potential derivational suppletion ........................................... 22 3.1.2 Ewondo: suppletion of possessive pronouns ...................................... 23 3.1.3 Conclusion on non-inflectional suppletion .......................................... 24 3.2 Suppletion and alienability; an example from Zoogocho Zapotec ............... 24 3.3 The lack of paradigm ............................................................................ 27 3.3.1 Northern Embera ........................................................................... 27 3.3.2 Makah .......................................................................................... 28 3.4 Semantic shift in the paradigm .............................................................. 28 3.4.1 Maltese gender distinctions ............................................................. 28 3.4.2 Modern Standard Arabic and other Semitic languages ........................ 30 3.4.3 Barasano and Maltese: „son‟/‟daughter‟ versus „children‟ ..................... 31 3.4.4 Conclusion on semantic shift in the paradigm .................................... 32 3.5 Phonological distance ........................................................................... 33 3.6 Broken plural and alternating stems ....................................................... 34 3.6.1 Modern Standard Arabic ................................................................. 34 3.6.2 Discussion on section 3.6................................................................ 36 4. Results ..................................................................................... 37 4.1 Nominal suppletion .............................................................................. 37 4.1.1 Cross-linguistic distribution ............................................................. 38 4.1.2 Grammatical category .................................................................... 38 4.1.3 Animacy ....................................................................................... 44 4.1.4 Suppletion and lexical meaning ....................................................... 46 4.1.5 Conclusions on nominal suppletion ................................................... 49 4.2 Adjectival suppletion ............................................................................ 50 4.2.1 Cross-linguistic distribution ............................................................. 50 4.2.2 Distribution and grammatical category ............................................. 50 4.2.3 Conclusions on adjectival suppletion ................................................ 52 4.3 Suppletion in the Semitic sample ........................................................... 52 4.3.1 Nominal suppletion in the Semitic sample ......................................... 52 4.3.2 Adjectival suppletion in the Semitic sample ....................................... 53 4.3.3 Conclusion on suppletion in the Semitic sample ................................. 54 5. Discussion ................................................................................ 54 5.1 Nominal versus verbal suppletion ........................................................... 55 5.2 Discussion of nominal suppletion ........................................................... 55 5.2.2 The suppletive „child‟ ...................................................................... 55 5.2.3 Motivations for suppletion according to number ................................. 57 5.2.1 Nominal suppletion and kinship terms .............................................. 58 5.2.4 Motivations for suppletion according to animacy ................................ 60 5.3 Discussion of adjectival suppletion ......................................................... 61 5.4 Discussion of the Semitic sample ........................................................... 61 5.5 Corbett‟s criteria of canonical suppletion ................................................. 62 5.6 Suggestion of relevance hierarchy ......................................................... 62 6. Conclusion ............................................................................... 64 References ................................................................................... 66 Appendix 1 ................................................................................... 68 Appendix 2 ................................................................................... 74 Appendix 3 ................................................................................... 76 Appendix 4 ................................................................................... 79 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Ljuba Veselinova for all the insightful comments, the patience, the encouragement and the extra hours spend on reading various versions of the thesis instead of enjoying the hottest summer Sweden has seen in many years. She has also provided the three maps in this thesis. I am very grateful for her supervision. Likewise, I would like to thank Professor Greville Corbett, Dunstan Brown, Marina Chumakina and Andrew Hippisley in the Surrey Morphology Group for the database on suppletive forms provided online. Without the detailed and well presented data, this investigation would not have been possible to do in the present way. For Maltese I received expert help from Professor Albert Borg at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and Michael Spagnol at Konstanz Universität, who has corrected, commented and added suppletive forms for my data on Maltese. I am immensely grateful for these corrections and observations. Also, Professor Elie Wardini at Stockholm University has corrected and commented on some issues regarding irregular number marking in the Semitic language family and the difficulties in defining suppletion for the language family. The comments have been both very interesting