The interaction of suppletion, defectiveness and periphrasis
In a classical (in both senses!) paradigm all the forms are built from the same lexical base by
the addition of various affixes and/or the operation of morphological processes. Two
departures from this canonical state of affairs which have attracted considerable theoretical
interest in recent years are SUPPLETION and PERIPHRASIS. The former is exemplified by
French vais ‘go.1SG.PRES’, allons ‘go.1PL.PRES’, irons ‘go.1PL.FUT’, the latter by French
suis/sommes allé(s)‘go.1SG/PL.PERF’. Less attention has been paid to connections between
these two phenomena. In the present paper we explore the relations, both diachronic and
synchronic, between suppletion and periphrasis and their relation in turn to a third concept,
namely DEFECTIVENESS.
We begin with the pair most widely studied in the traditional literature, namely suppletion and
defectiveness, for which a strong diachronic claim is made by Strunk (1977:3) ‘Suppletion
setzt durchweg Defektivität voraus, ohne daß umgekehrt Defektivität notwendig und immer
von Suppletion begleitet wäre.’ As long as we remain within the domain of morphological
formations, the historical record seems to bear out Strunk’s claim. Functionally, however, a
periphrasis may also serve to remedy a paradigmatic gap, as in the often discussed case of
Latin perfective passives (Börjars et al 1997, Sadler & Spencer 2001). Does Strunk’s
hypothesis still hold? We argue that it does and that periphrases are only integrated into
paradigms when a structural gap requires to be filled. This circumstance is exemplified in the
rise of Romance periphrastic passives and perfects leading to complex paradigmatic
oppositions between for example French il tue ‘he kills’/il est tué ‘he is killed’/il a tué ‘he has
killed’/il a été tué ‘he has been killed’.
In such a case the integration of the periphrasis generates a further gap since the periphrastic
passive requires there to be a past participle of the passive auxiliary être ‘be’ in the perfect il a
été tué, yet the Latin verb esse ‘be’ did not have a past participle. Suppletion is one means of
solving the problem, exactly as predicted by Strunk, with the required past participle being
borrowed from the verb stare ‘stand’, whence French été and Italian stato, or from sedere ‘sit’,
whence Spanish and Portuguese sido. The alternative is to have recourse to analogy as in
Old Italian suto (< *ess + uto).
An important difference between suppletion and periphrases is that the latter may arise
spontaneously even in the absence of defectiveness via well studied mechanisms of
grammaticalization (see for example the material collected in Heine 1993). Prior
defectiveness is not therefore a constraint on the generation of periphrases but only on their
incorporation into paradigms. This in turn requires us to be able to distinguish when a
periphrasis is part of a paradigm and when it is not. A relevant principle here is proposed by
Ackerman & Stump (2004: 128) under the name FEATURAL INTERSECTIVITY, namely that
a periphrasis is only part of a paradigm when there are related synthetic or morphological
formations.
This principle also finds its diachronic explanation in Strunk’s hypothesis since a periphrasis
can only be integrated into a domain where morphological defectiveness holds, and this is a
fortiori impossible if there are no morphological formations in the first place. This in turn yields
the prediction that a paradigm made up purely of periphrastic formations is not possible, not
for conceptual reasons but because there would be no diachronic route by which it could
arise. We conclude with a discussion of two possible counterexamples to this claim, namely
the co-verb constructions of some Australian languages (Schultze-Berndt 2000) and the
pronoun system of the Amazonian language Wari’ analysed by Everett (2005).
REFERENCES
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