<span class="translation_missing" title="translation missing: en.options.poster">poster</span>: Verb suppletion by gender in languages of New Guinea

Verb suppletion by gender is a rare, unusual phenomenon in which different verb stems are used in accordance with the grammatical gender of a participant. I present an account of seven languages of New Guinea which all exhibit this phenomenon, by exploring its variations in several typological criteria and discussing its relevance in the wider context of verb suppletion and the languages of New Guinea. Finally, I undertake speculations about the emergence of verb suppletion by gender.

Due to its rarity, verb suppletion by gender has been largely overlooked by typologists studying suppletion and gender alike. This seems less surprising considering Bybee's (1985) well-established assumption that suppletion in verb paradigms is more likely to appear along the more “relevant” categories, that is, those categories that more heavily affect the basic meaning of the stem. In fact, Bybee considers gender agreement the least relevant verbal category, making verb suppletion by gender the least likely type of verb suppletion conceivable.

To make sense of this phenomenon, I record the numbers and meanings of the suppletive verb stems, the gender systems they are embedded in, and the alignment types they tend to follow. As it turns out, verb suppletion by gender is not significantly less marginal than more common types of verb suppletion in the affected languages, it is usually embedded into gender systems with two genders and highly opaque assignment strategies, and tends to follow the same alignment type as the core arguments in the affected languages.

The emergence of verb suppletion remains hard to imagine, since it requires verbs to develop a gender-specific meaning to then be reanalyzed as a gender agreement inflection of another verb with a similar meaning.

This poster presentation will represent the results of my ongoing B.A. thesis at the University of Regensburg.

Info

Day: 2024-05-10
Start time: 10:40
Duration: 00:10
Room: Poster titles
Track: Typology and Variational Linguistics
Language: en

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