Re: PLUG: SpecGram Current Issue

BP:

On 3/3/07, Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...> wrote:
> On 3.3.2007 Dirk Elzinga wrote:
>  > > I enjoyed it too, but I was wondering about the
>  > > distinction between suppletion and use of separate
>  > > lexemes. Are we to believe that English <am> and <were>
>  > > "belong" to the same lexeme even though they have
>  > > distinct roots?
>  >
>  > Yes. A lexeme is the set of all inflectionally
>  > related forms.
>
> It is a little hard to stomach if you are historically
> minded, as there were two distinct verbs _beon_ and _wesan_
> in Old English, forms of which have mixed to form a
> suppletive paradigm in modern English. To be sure to my
> Swedish Sprachgefühl _var_ is the past tense of _är_ --
> *bhuH not being preserved in Swedish --, but has the concept
> of 'suppletion' no place in your concept of 'lexeme', and
> how does 'lexeme' relate to 'root' or 'stem'?
In my thinking, a lexeme is just what I said above; a set of
inflectionally related forms. How the cells of a paradigm acquire
their material is a historical problem, not one of synchronic
linguistics. Having said that, when I find suppletion, I strongly
suspect a historical source. Just as English has the beon ~ wesan
suppletion (not to mention the go ~ wend suppletion), I assume that
the Uto-Aztecan verbal number suppletion probably had a historical
origin. But that historical origin must date all the way back to
Proto-Uto-Aztecan since reflexes of it appear in all daughter language
families.

As for the lexeme v. root/stem question. I don't believe in
roots/stems/affixes. I am almost completely convinced that some form
of Word-and-Paradigm morphology is how we learn, process and produce
morphologically complex forms. The relations between elements of a
paradigm can be expressed through relational rules of the type David
Peterson scarfed from Bochner, or which are proposed in much of
Stephen Anderson's work. Of course, this stance doesn't prevent me
from using roots, stems and affixes when they are useful from a
descriptive point of view. In that case, I would have to say that a
lexeme which shows suppletion in its paradigm must be described as
having multiple stems.

>
> I'm well aware that one can be overly historically minded as
> well as overly ahistorically minded. IMHO past language
> stages are no more, but neither are there to my mind any
> stable synchronic stages, as language as all other human
> activity essentially *is* change in time. But then I have
> had several heavy doses of Buddhist philosophy! :-)
Yes. Languages may be inherently unstable, but there are enough
patterns to keep us busy for a while (before the whole thing shifts
out from under our feet).

Dirk