Re: PLUG: SpecGram Current Issue

On Mar 2, 2007, at 7:30 PM, Dirk Elzinga wrote:

> On 3/2/07, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...> 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. If you
> plot the verbal categories on a grid with the columns headed singular
> and plural, and the rows headed 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person,
> you get a 2x3 grid which you can fill in with verb forms. You can
> extend this into three dimensions if you include tense (and there's no
> reason not to include it since English verbs distinguish past from
> non-past tenses). <am> fills the 1st person singular cell in the
> present tense, and <were> fills everything but the 1st and 3rd person
> singular in the past tense. Same paradigm, so same lexeme.
That makes sense. It doesn't quite answer my question, but upon
rereading the part I was asking about --

The second question one is forced to ask is, even though it would be
utterly bizarre to have an empty cell in a paradigm, is it the case
that, perhaps, the elative dual forms are simply separate lexemes, as
unrelated as “car” and “pickle”?

-- I think my question came out of some confusion. I was thinking
that there would be no appreciable difference between a) a suppletive
paradigm and b) a paradigm where a different lexeme fills in one or
more slots; but now that I've reread it, I *think* what David was
saying was that perhaps the elative dual forms elicited did not in
fact bear any relation, even a paradigmatic one, to the other forms.
Dr. Muddybanks?

>
> Some Uto-Aztecan languages show regular suppletion of verb forms based
> on the number of the subject for intransitives or for the number of
> the object for transitives; it is thus an ergative pattern. Some
> examples from Shoshoni: nukki 'run (sg.subj)' ~ nuraa 'run (pl.subj)';
> paikka 'kill (sg.obj)' ~ wase 'kill (pl.obj)' . The form alternations
> themselves are unpredictable (else it wouldn't be suppletion), but it
> is a regular feature of the language (at least for the several dozen
> verbs it applies to).
>
> Verb suppletion was probably a feature of Proto-Uto-Aztecan, though
> many (if not most) of the Southern Uto-Aztecan langauges have lost it.
> However, in Tepiman verbal number agreement is still ergatively
> aligned. In Tohono O'odham, a Tepiman language spoken on the
> Arizona/Mexico border, number agreement is marked by initial
> reduplication. Again, for intransitive verbs verbal number agrees with
> the subject, but for transitives it agrees with the number of the
> object: cipkan 'work (sg.subj)' ~ cicpkan 'work (pl.subj)' ; ceposid
> 'brand (sg.obj)' ~ cecposid 'brand (pl.obj)'.
>
> But that was more than you wanted to know.
Not at all! Uto-Aztecan is fascinating, and I love the idea of
ergatively aligned number marking; I've read about it in several
places recently. It seems to me that it might be related to
pluractionality, which is also a fun concept.

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