The scope of suppletion

(joint work with Shanti Ulfsbjorninn)

This course has the aim of productively comparing Distributed Morphology (DM) and Nanosyntax (Nano). Accordingly, we find it helpful to adapt from the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos (1970) the concept of scientific research programs, which form around a “hard core” of theoretical proposals that are “irrefutable by the methodological decision” of those engaged in the research program: the hard core cannot be changed without abandoning it altogether. The hard core also provides positive methodological heuristics for formulating “a protective belt” of “auxiliary hypotheses”, which can “get adjusted and re-adjusted, or even completely replaced, to defend the thus-hardened core” against empirical threats. A research program is “progressive” when modifications to its auxiliary hypotheses yield “an increase in empirical content”, thereby corroborating the theoretical hard core.

In Lakatosian terms, DM and Nano can be seen as research programs with the overlapping hard cores of Merge, i.e. ‘syntax all the way down’, and Modularity, i.e. ‘Late Insertion’, but which employ different auxiliary hypotheses to explain acknowledged empirical anomalies. To further explicate some such similarities and differences between the two programs, we examine suppletion in phonological form (PF)—a prima facie counterexample to Merge—and consider its scope both empirically and theoretically with familiar, oft-cited English examples.

There are three attested empirical possibilities: no suppletion, i.e. ‘regulars’ like cats, dogs, and foxes; partial suppletion, e.g. the eponymous mice and men; and total suppletion, e.g. people and worse. Our main theoretical proposal is that incorporating an independently-motivated research program in autosegmental phonology makes it possible to discard the anti-modular auxiliary hypothesis of morphophonological “Readjustment” rules in DM in favor of hard-core phonological analyses for cases of partial suppletion. We furthermore suggest how such progressive modifications to our phonological auxiliary hypotheses could be made compatible with Nano’s theoretical hard-core of phrasal insertion while avoiding unconstrained superset analyses that treat cases of partial suppletion identically to total suppletion.

Level: advanced