Suppletion and stem dependency in inflectional morphology

The purpose of this paper is to present a general approach to verbal inflection with special emphasis on suppletion phenomena. The approach is applied to French in this paper, but it extends straightforwardly to other languages.1 The first part of the paper describes an analysis of suppletion in inflectional morphology with two design requirements. First, we attempt to provide an analysis which not only accounts for the existence of suppletion phenomena, but also accounts for the fact that suppletion is not erratic: suppletive forms tend to always appear in groups, in definite areas of verbal paradigms. Second, we try to minimize the quantity of redundant phonological information that has to be listed in the lexicon for a given lexeme. We assume that an optimal analysis of inflection should be able to derive all and only predictable inflectional forms from a single representation. Our analysis is based on the observation of a number of dependency relations between inflectional forms of verbs.2 We define for each language a stem dependency tree based on these observations, which allows one to predict the whole paradigm of every verb in the language on the basis of a minimal number of idiosyncratic stems. The second part of the paper attempts to integrate the analysis in an HPSG hierarchical lexicon. Morphological dependency relations are represented directly by mentioning a lexical sign in another sign’s lexical entry. The approach to suppletion proposed in the first part is made explicit using a combination of online type construction and default constraints on the phonology of dependent signs.