Case-driven plural suppletion in Barguzin Buryat: *ABA versus case containment
Colin Davis
August 2021
 

[To appear in Glossa titled "Case-sensitive plural suppletion in Barguzin Buryat: On case containment, suppletion typology, and competition in morphology".] This paper examines plural suppletion in Barguzin Buryat (Mongolic, Russia), which occurs only in accusative and genitive noun phrases. The restricted distribution of this process, in particular its impossibility in oblique cases, is significant for recent research on the typology of suppletion and the feature structure of case. For much work in this vein, this plural suppletion would qualify as an “ABA” pattern, which is predicted to be unattested. I argue that the suppletive plural morpheme in Barguzin Buryat is a portmanteau, which superficially has an ABA distribution because it conflicts, for independent reasons, with the morphological requirements of oblique cases. Since the distribution of this plural form is reducible to independent factors, it does not falsify the morphological theories that ban ABA patterns under normal circumstances, but rather reveals a principled exception to them that sharpens our understanding of them.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/004504
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: To appear in Glossa
keywords: case, suppletion typology, morphology, portmanteau
previous versions: v8 [July 2021]
v7 [May 2021]
v6 [May 2021]
v5 [November 2020]
v4 [November 2020]
v3 [November 2019]
v2 [July 2019]
v1 [March 2019]
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