Part 4: Morphology
Morphology beyond affixes
Catherine Anderson; Bronwyn Bjorkman; Derek Denis; Julianne Doner; Margaret Grant; Nathan Sanders; and Ai Taniguchi
There are some morphological patterns that don’t obviously involve affixes at all. In this section we discuss two examples: internal change and suppletion.
Internal change
Internal change is one name for the type of change found in many irregular English noun plurals and verb past tenses.
For example, for many speakers of English the plural of mouse is mice, the plural of goose is geese, the past tense of sit is sat, and the past tense of write is wrote
These are all relics of what used to be a regular pattern in English. By regular we mean that they were phonologically predictable based on the general pattern of the language, and automatically applied to new words. For speakers of English today, changes like “mouse becomes mice when it’s plural” have to be memorized, and are therefore irregular.
Suppletion
Suppletion is an even more irregular pattern, where a particular morphological form involves entirely replacing the form of a morpheme. Suppletion is always irregular—you can never predict what the result of suppletion will be, it always has to be memorized. For example, the past tense of the verb go is went—there is no amount of affixation or internal change that will get you from one to the other. This type of total replacement is also found in English in the comparatives and superlatives good ~ better ~ best and bad ~ worse ~ worst, throughout the paradigm of the verb to be, and on some pronouns.
If a language has suppletion (and not all languages do!) it is commonly found on some of the most frequent words in the language, just as we see in English. The reason for this is that children acquiring a language tend to assume patterns are regular and predictable until the weight of the evidence convinces them otherwise—and they’re more likely to get enough evidence to reach the conclusion that something is suppletive if a word is incredibly common.
Suppletion is a type of allomorphy, which we will learn more about in the next section of this chapter
Shaw, P. (2008). Inside Access: The Prosodic Role of Internal Morphological Constituency. In The Nature of the Word: Studies in Honor of Paul Kiparsky. ed. Kristin Hanson and Sharon Inkelas. The MIT Press.
