Phonological Conditions on Affixation

Chapter 2: Segmentally conditioned suppletive allomorphy
In this chapter I present examples and an analysis of suppletive allomorphy
conditioned by consonants and vowels and their features. The ‘P >> M’ ranking schema
discussed in chapter 1, where phonological constraints are ranked ahead of morphological
constraints, predicts that any segment or feature anywhere in the word should in principle
be able to condition the distribution of suppletive allomorphs of affixes or stems for
reasons of output optimization. The extent to which this prediction is or is not borne out
is discussed in §2.1, where I present examples of segmentally conditioned allomorphy
revealed by a cross-linguistic survey. In §2.2, I give an analysis of representative
examples of this type in terms of subcategorization, demonstrating that such an analysis
is feasible and superior to a P >> M analysis. The chapter is concluded in §2.3 with a
summary of the findings and the analysis.
2.1 Survey results
In this section, I give examples of suppletive allomorphy conditioned by segments
and their features. These examples were collected as part of a cross-linguistic survey of
phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy (PCSA), described in chapter 1.
Grammars of over 600 languages were surveyed, yielding 137 examples of PCSA in 67
languages. Seventy-two of these cases (from 32 different languages) involve conditioning
by consonants or vowels or their features and are discussed in this chapter. The examples
in this chapter are organized according to the effect that the pattern of allomorph
distribution has on the word, as follows.
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