Seminar Series: Abstract

11.00
May 25 2009
Seminar Room C

Verbal number and Suppletion in Hiw (Vanuatu): a morphological curiosity
Alex Francois (CNRS / Linguistics, RSPAS)

While several recent typological studies (e.g. Veselinova 2006, Corbett 2007) have renewed interest on the issue of morphological suppletion, Austronesian languages have so far played little contribution in these reflections. Suppletion takes place when a grammatical function is encoded by a change of lexical root, rather than through mere inflection or grammatical morphemes. The domain involved may be Tense-Aspect-Mood (Eng. go vs went), adjectival morphology (Eng. bad vs worse), number of nouns (Eng. person vs people), among others. Some languages scattered around the world – especially in north America – show a pattern sometimes described as suppletion, whereby some verbs change their radical according to the number of participants and/or the plurality of the event (Durie 1986, Mithun 1988). The only Austronesian languages which have so far been reported to follow this pattern are Polynesian, e.g. Samoan (Mosel & Hovdhaugen 1992) or Kapingamarangi (Lieber & Dikepa 1974).

Lo-Toga and Hiw, two non-Polynesian languages spoken on the Torres Is at the extreme north of Vanuatu, have innovated such a system of verbal suppletion based on the number of participants. Thus in Hiw, ‘die’ will translate as mët with a singular subject, but qetqēt with a plural; ‘cut’ will be tar̄e if the object is singular, but r̄ōt if it is plural. While Lo-Toga applies this principle to 14 verbs, Hiw has increased its inventory of number-sensitive verbs up to 26 – a high figure by typological standards.

I propose to present and discuss the characteristics of the system in Hiw, both semantic and morphosyntactic. Based on the typological debate, I will especially ask whether we are dealing here with suppletion proper; whether this is an instance of agreement; and whether each verb pair must be seen as one lexeme, or two separate words.