Morphology Circle: Adam Singerman

Speaker: Adam Singerman (Syracuse University)

Title: Verbal suppletion in Tuparí, an Indigenous Brazilian language: a typological counterexample

Date and time: 21 October, 4pm (CET)

Place: Zoom

Abstract

Recent work in the framework of Distributed Morphology (especially by Heidi Harley and colleagues) has put forward a series of crosslinguistic generalizations regarding the phenomenon of verbal suppletion. In particular, it has been argued that number-sensitive suppletion can only be triggered by the internal argument of a verb, giving rise to a surface ergative-absolutive pattern — even in languages that otherwise manifest nominative-accusative alignment. In this talk I present the complex suppletive paradigms of verbs in Tuparí, an Indigenous Brazilian language that I have been documenting and analyzing for the past decade. I argue that Tuparí constitutes a counterexample to the crosslinguistic generalizations put forward in the Distributed Morphology literature. In particular, I show that suppletion in Tuparí is uniformly triggered by the nominative argument, even in cases of transitivized verbs (‘take’ from ‘go,’ ‘bring’ from ‘come,’ ‘have’ from ‘be’). My argument is supported by the fact that Tuparí shows very clear subject-object asymmetries, which make it possible for the linguist seeking to analyze the language — and for the child acquiring it as their L1 — to see exactly which argument is responsible for triggering the suppletion.

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