Talk:Suppletion

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I could use some information on the origins of the various forms of aller/ir/andare from a Latin scholar. -- user:Montrealais

I have supplied them as well as I am able, at least for the French forms -- IHCOYC 20:42 Mar 20, 2003 (UTC)

There is no Latin verb andare. Spanish andar < Latin ambulare. 4pq1injbok 23:32, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Latin verb ferre, to bring, carry has the principal parts fero, ferre, tuli, latum, meaning Is this irregular verb a result of suppletion in a precursor language? Any Latin scholars care to comment?

Contents 1 Domesticated Land Animals 2 Suppletion in English 3 Weak suppletion 4 Table of Comparatives/Superlatives

[edit] Domesticated Land Animals

Most domesticated land animals and their meat have a particularly rich set of non-cognate terms depending on age, sex, and castration. For instance: sheep, ram, ewe, wether, lamb, mutton. Do these numerous terms come under the category of suppletion? If not, where do they go? I am keen to see a table of such words, and create one if it doesn't exist, as it is a particularly striking feature of the English language. Is this phenomenon seen in other languages?

Suppletion relates to inflection, which is a grammatical feature. Animal names fall under Lexical gender rather than Grammatical_gender. ("Gender" in the wide sense of "type", not just sex.) That said, English does have less lexical gender (as well as less grammatical gender) than most other Indo-European languages. Regarding the list, Wikipedia is not a dictionary but have fun with the Animals list in Wiktionary. jnestorius^(talk) 14:17, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Suppletion in English

"He has been to France" is not a suppletion but a standard use of the verb "be" with an adjective phrase. Movement is implied by the dative quality of "to France" as in "He got to the final level in record-breaking time" or "I was already to Chapter 12 when he started reading." "Go" is not a required element.

[edit] Weak suppletion

I have removed the following section:

Morphemes themselves can also be suppletive. In English, the plural suffix -en which occurs in oxen is used in lieu of the more regular suffix -(e)s. In Seri, the infinitive prefix has two suppletive forms: ica- with intransitive verbs and iha- (plus change in the vowel under certain conditions) with transitive verbs. Also in Seri, the passive prefix has two suppletive forms: p- (plus change in the vowel under certain conditions) before vowel-initial roots, and ah- elsewhere. The imperative prefix in Seri has more than one suppletive allomorph; omitting some details, these suppletive allomorphs include c- in negative imperatives, c- when followed by a root that begins with a short low vowel, null plus a vowel change before an intransitive verb that begins with a non-low vowel, and h- elsewhere. The verb meaning 'arrive' has two suppletive stems: -afp when the subject is singular and -azcam when the subject is plural. The noun for 'thing' has two suppletive forms: ziix means 'thing' and xiica is the plural. Seri person is cmiique and the plural is comcaac.

I don't think "suppletive" is being used in the same way here. (I may be misinterpreting the above paragraph: in which case, by all means reinstate it, but try to make it clearer: I don't see how it qualifies as "suppletion" in the sense used in the article.) "Suppletion" can be defined:

• narrowly, as in this article, to mean use of an unrelated form as an inflection. Used in historical linguistics and philology As in:

• Bloch, Bernard; George Leonard Trager (1942). Outline of Linguistic Analysis. Linguistic Society of America at the Waverly Press, 48. “Suppletion may be regarded as an extreme kind of internal change, in which the entire base—not merely a part of it—is replaced by another” 
• Joseph E. Emonds (1985). A Unified Theory of Syntactic Categories, pg.170 §4.5. ISBN 9067650927. 

In traditional terms, the following types of highly irregular items in the lexical categories are said to be "suppletive."

Verbs: go/went; be/are; Latin ferre 'to bring' / tuli 'brought' / latus 'brought'

Nouns: person/people

Adjectives: good/better/well

Ordinary irregular variants such as stand/stood; catch/caught; woman/women are not generally considered suppletive.

• more broadly to mean anything that language students would call "irregular". Used in synchronic theoretical morphology. As in:

• Veselinova, Ljuba N. (2005). "79: Suppletion According to Tense and Aspect", in Martin Haspelmath: The World Atlas of Language Structures. OUP, pg.322. ISBN 0199255911. “Suppletion is defined as the phenomenon whereby regular semantic relations are encoded by unpredictable formal patterns. Cases where the paradigmatically related forms share some phonological material are examples of weak suppletion, as in English buy versus bought, while cases with no shared phonological material are instances of strong suppletion, as in English go versus went.” 
• Piapoco and Natural Morphology Theory (PDF) pg.44, footnote 19. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Retrieved on 2007-10-09.

The Natural Scale of Morphotactic Transparency illustrates the hierarchy in which morphological and phonological rules cause some morphemes to be more transparent than others. The scale is: Total Transparency > Resyllabification > Phonological Rules > Morphological Rules > Weak Suppletion > Strong Suppletion.

Someone with access to the following might fill this in better:

• Dressler, Wolfgang U (1985). "On the predictiveness of Natural Morphology". Journal of linguistics 21: pp.321-338. 
• Dressler, Wolgang U (1986). "Explanation in Natural Morphology, illustrated with comparative and agent-noun formation". Linguistics 24 (4): pp.519-548. 
• Mel'čuk, Igor (2006). "Chapter 8: Suppletion", in David Beck: Aspects of the Theory of Morphology. de Gruyter. ISBN 3110177110. 

Probably the article should distinguish between the broad/weak and narrow/strong senses, but I think it should concentrate on the latter. jnestorius^(talk) 21:03, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Table of Comparatives/Superlatives

The column labeled "Comparative/Superlative" contains mixed information, so that it is not clear (to one, like me, who is unfamiliar with these languages) whether the words in the rows for Romance languages are comparatives or superlatives. I suspect someone expanded an existing table without amending the label or the structure. Perhaps this column should be broken into two, yes? fuper (talk) 15:54, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

No, the same word is both comparative and superlative depending on the construction. The multiple words are for the multiple languages. I'm unsure how this might be conveyed more clearly. --jnestorius^(talk) 20:04, 20 January 2008 (UTC)