In the now extinct Frisian dialect of the island of Wangerooge, the naming verb heit ‘to be called’ had partially grammaticalized into a copular verb ‘to be’ competing, to some extent, with the original copula wízze ‘to be’. In this paper, I discuss the development and the status of the copula heit in some detail and consider what it might tell one about the taxonomy of copular clauses (Higgins 1979). I show that the functional change from naming verb to copula initially occurred in identificational copular clauses. From there heit spread to classifi-cational and specificational copular clauses, but not to predicational ones. This development suggests a principled distinction between predicational copular clauses on the one hand and identificational copular clauses (conceived as comprising classifying, specifying, and equating ones) on the other. This does not imply, however, that heit is an identificational copula or that it selects an identificational small clause. I analyze copular heit used with an identificational small clause as a suppletive allomorph of wízze ‘to be’.*

Numerals and ordinals occupy a special place in the typology of suppletion. In generative work, one basic cross-linguistic parameter is whether ordinal allomorphy displays internal vs. external marking. Internal marking is when irregular forms propagate from lower ordinals to higher ones (English ‘first’$ \to $‘twenty-first’), whereas external marking is the lack of propagation. We catalog ordinal formation in Armenian dialects through both formal-generative and functional-typological perspectives. We find that Eastern Armenian and Early Western Armenian are uniformly external-marking systems for the ordinals of ‘1–4’. However, Modern Western Armenian is a mixed system: ‘1’ displays external-marking while ‘2–4’ display internal-marking. Simultaneously, the ordinal of ‘1’ uses a suppletive portmanteau, while the ordinals of ‘2–4’ use agglutinative allomorphs. We formalize these differences in a derivational approach to morphology (Distributed Morphology). We argue that mixed systems arise from allomorphy rules that are sensitive to either constituency or linearity. The Western mixed system seems typologically rare and novel. Given our formal analysis, we then uncover other asymmetries in the propagation of irregular ordinals and the retention of portmanteau morphology across 35 Armenian varieties. The end result is a strong functional correlation between suppletion, external marking, and lower numerals.

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.