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Suppletion and morpheme order: Are words special?1

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BobaljikJonathan David, Universals in comparative morphology: Suppletion, superlatives, and the structure of words (Current Studies in Linguistics 50). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Pp. xiii + 332.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2017

PAVEL CAHA
PAVEL CAHA*
Affiliation:
Masarykova univerzita Brno
*
Author’s address: The Department of the Czech Language, Masarykova univerzita Brno, Arna Nováka 1, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic[email protected]
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Abstract

This article reviews some of the main theoretical claims made in Jonathan David Bobaljik’s 2012 book, which deals with root suppletion in adjectival degree expressions. My first goal is to make the reader familiar with a coherent fragment of the overall system and the data that motivate it. The second goal is to discuss one specific part of the account, namely that words, understood as complex heads, are special for suppletion in the sense that suppletion is impossible beyond this domain. I argue that it is possible to abandon this assumption with no loss of descriptive coverage, and argue that in doing so, we can formulate a unified theory which covers both suppletion and morpheme order.

Keywords

*ABAdegree morphologymorpheme ordersuppletionwords
Type
Review Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , 10 November 2017 , pp. 865 - 896
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

[1]

I am grateful to three anonymous JL referees for their comments. They helped me in removing a lot of errors, typos and imprecisions of the original version. The research reported on in this paper was supported by funding from GAČR (The Czech Science Foundation), project GA17-10144S, awarded to Pavel Caha. Parts of the research were also supported by GA14-04215S, awarded to Markéta Ziková. The article appears with support received from the Faculty of Arts at Masarykova Univerzita (ROZV/20/FF/CAH/2015).

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