Last updated by grzegorz on 2021-02-27. Originally submitted by tomski on 2021-02-22.
WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 45 minutes (+15 minutes for discussion). We welcome all to a POST-DOCTORAL LECTURE ONLINE (MS Teams) "English verbs: What is suppletive allomorphy?" by dr hab. Bartosz Wiland (Friday, February 26, 13:15-14:15).
dr hab. Bartosz Wiland
Department of English-Polish Comparative Linguistics
"English verbs: What is suppletive allomorphy?"
ABSTRACT
A well-known challenge that is common to every learner of English and to linguists alike is making sure that they can combine an appropriate verb root with an appropriate affix, e.g.
start-ed or
giv-en instead of
*start-en or
*giv-ed. For linguists, a standard take on this challenge is to rely on contextual selection and to say, for example, that “-en is a contextual variant of -ed, which is selected only by a special subset of verb roots, which includes give but not start.” Such a contextual change in the form of an affix is called
allomorphy. In other words, the standard approach relies on assigning verb roots to particular classes (under various names such as “class 1 weak”, “regular”, “strong”, etc.) and linking the members of these classes with particular allomorphs.
One problem with such an approach is that it requires a fairly complex typology of verb classes since verb roots, too, can change their forms when they combine with an affix, (e.g.
give remains unchanged when it combines with
-en in
giv-en, but some other verb roots change their forms with
-en, like
bite –bitt-en, swell – swoll-en, etc.). Such a contextual change of a root is called
suppletive allomorphy or, when it involves phonologically unrelated forms like
go and
went,
suppletion. Both processes in a certain sense mimic allomorphy. The contextual selection is further complicated by roots that do not combine with any affix at all in the formation of the participle (e.g.
swim –
swum,
put – put). Another problem is that relying on classes and contextual selection merely restates the facts but doesn’t explain them.
The real question, thus, is what is suppletive allomorphy about?
In this talk, I’ll follow the recent line of research that suggests that suppletive allmorphy is a function of grammatical size understood in terms of the number of grammatical features. That is, a structurally “bigger” root will merge with a “smaller” affix and vice versa. This, I will argue, explains the distribution of suppletive forms as well as root syncretism in the domain of English participles and preterites.
Bartosz Wiland (Ph.D. 2009) is an associate professor in the Department of English-Polish Comparative Linguistics. He is interested in the relation between grammar and the lexicon. In particular, he explores the idea that the mental lexicon stores nothing but entire syntactic subtrees paired with meaning and exponents. In his 2019 book The spellout algorithm and lexicalization patterns (Language Science Press) he applies this logic to explain syncretisms and lexical containment in the domain of Slavic verbs, complementizers, and demonstrative pronouns.