보충법에 대하여

초록

This article examines some aspects of suppletion and argues that the phonologically irregular and unpredictable suppletive forms of given morphemes reveal very important linguistic structures. It is shown that, despite the phonological peculiarities, the morphosyntactic structures and contexts of the suppletive allomorphs are highly constrained. To support this stance, two recent, very influential suppletion studies are examined. The first study is Bobaljik’s (2012) probe of comparative and superlative forms of adjectives. With more than 300 languages, he convincingly identifies the structure of the superlative degree construction and the locality domain for suppletion. The second research is on the interaction of negative and honorific suppletions in Korean as in iss- ‘exist’, eps- ‘NEG.exist’ and an-kyey-si- ‘NEG-exist.HON-HON’ by Chung (2007, 2009). He carefully shows the way phonological exponents of morphemes are provided in the given complex morphosyntactic structures, i.e., from the root outward in a cyclic fashion. These studies show that suppletion phenomena support the separation hypothesis assumed in Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz, 1993).

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