Description

While linguists have investigated the notions ‘possible human language’ and ‘possible sentence’, less has been done to establish the bounds of possibility for the word. As part of continuing research into inflectional morphology, we intend to explore one of these boundaries, where different inflectional forms are not related phonologically. An example is Russian celovek ‘person’, which has the plural ljud-i, a typical instance of suppletion. Suppletion is found in many inflecting languages and involves extremely frequent words. As Carstairs-McCarthy shows, the phenomenon “increasingly ... is coming to be seen as a clue to the way in which the inflected forms of a word are related to each other paradigmatically ... and are stored in the memory” (1994: 4410). As yet, little is known about the range of patterns of suppletion which are attested in the world’s languages, about the universal constraints governing their occurrence, or their co-occurrence with other phenomena.

Following the methodology of other successful projects, we plan to investigate suppletion in two ways. We will undertake a detailed analysis of a language which offers both several interesting examples of suppletion and readily available resources in electronic form, namely Russian. This language also provides useful insights into how suppletion arises and is lost. As the complementary part of the project, we will examine a range of genetically diverse languages, create a database, and use it to construct a typologically informed theory of suppletion. This will be relevant to linguists working in various frameworks, and in the light of the quotation above, potentially of interest to psycholinguists too.

Suppletion project outputs:

1. Publications:

Andrew Hippisley. 2001. Suppletion, Frequency and Lexical Storage. In: Andronis, Mary; Christopher Ball, Heidi Elston and Sylvain Neuvel (eds) CLS 37: the Main Session. Papers from the 37th Meeting of Chicago Linguistics Society. Vol. 1. Chicago: CLS. 201-14.

Andrew Hippisley, Marina Chumakina, Greville G. Corbett and Dunstan Brown. 2003. Suppletion: frequency, categories and distribution of stems. To appear in: Studies in Language.

Greville G. Corbett. 2003. A typology of suppletion: the evidence from Slavonic. (Paper for the 13th International Congress of Slavists). Available with the British Contributions at https://dspace.gla.ac.uk/handle/1721.1/21

Greville Corbett . Forthcoming. Suppletion: typology, markedness, complexity. To appear in: Andreas Bittner, Frans Plank and Patrick Steinkrüger (eds) On Inflection: In Memory of Wolfgang U. Wurzel. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

* Greville G. Corbett. Forthcoming. Suppletion in personal pronouns: theory versus practice, and the place of reproducibility in typology. To appear in: Linguistic Typology 8.3 (2004).

*Marina Chumakina, Andrew Hippisley and Greville Corbett. Forthcoming . Исторические изменения в русской лексике : случай чередующегося супплетивизма . To appear in: Russian Linguistics.

2.  Conference and Seminar Papers:

Andrew Hippisley. April 2001. Suppletion, Frequency and Lexical Storage. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, Chicago University, 19 April 2001.

Greville Corbett . March 2001. What is a possible word? The view from morphology. Paper read at the Linguistics Seminar, University of Edinburgh.

Greville Corbett . December 2001. Suppletion: typology, markedness, complexity. Invited Paper read at the Conference: Wolfgang Ullrich Wurzel in memoriam - Typologische Aspekte von Markiertheit und Komplexität. Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung, Berlin, 6-8 December 2001.

Greville Corbett . March 2002. The notion "possible word" and the extremes of inflectional morphology. Paper read at the Fakultetets Forsknings Fredage, Faculty of Arts, University of Copenhagen.

Marina Chumakina. June 2002. Suppletion in North- and South Caucasian languages: lexemes and grammatical categories specific to the region. Paper read at the XI Colloquium of the Societas Caucasologica Europaea, Lomonosov Moscow State University, 20-22 June.

Dunstan Brown, Marina Chumakina, Greville Corbett and Andrew Hippisley. September, 2002. Prototypical Suppletion. Paper read at the LAGB Autumn Meeting. UMIST, 17-19 September.

Andrew Hippisley, Marina Chumakina, Greville Corbett and Dunstan Brown. February, 2003. Constraints on suppletion. Paper read at Surrey Morphology Meeting, University of Surrey, 12 February.

Greville Corbett . February 2003. 'Possible words': the limiting points in inflectional morphology. Paper read at the University of Oxford. Oxford, 24 February.

Marina Chumakina, Andrew Hippisley and Greville Corbett. March, 2003. Istoričeskie izmenenija v russkoj leksike: slučai čeredujuščegosja suppletivizma. Paper read at the BASEES Annual Meeting. University of Cambridge, 30 March.

Greville Corbett . April 2003. A Typology of Suppletion and the Notion "Possible Word". Paper read at the workshop on "Paradigm Irregularities", University of Manchester, 10-11 April 2003.

Greville Corbett . May 2003. The canonical approach to syntactic and morphological typology. Paper read at the University of Kentucky.

Greville Corbett . July 2003. The typology of possible words: the place of suppletion. The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig. Department of Linguistics.

Greville Corbett . August 2003. A typology of suppletion: the evidence from Slavonic. Paper read at the XIII International Congress of Slavists, Ljubljana.

Marina Chumakina, Andrew Hippisley and Greville Corbett. September 2003. Alternating suppletion. Paper read at the LAGB autumn meeting, University of Oxford.

Greville Corbett . September 2003. Typology of the morphological extreme. Invited lecture read at MMM4: Morphology and Language Typology, Catania, Sicily.

Marina Chumakina, Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett and Andrew Hippisley. September 2003. The Surrey Database of Suppletion. Workshop on "Database-driven linguistic typology" at the Language Typology Research Centre Annual Meeting, Estoril.

Greville Corbett . October 2003. Extreme words: a typology of suppletion. School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London