Suppletion in the Languages of the Caucasus

SUPPLETION IN THE LANGUAGES OF THE CAUCASUS

Thomas R. Wier, Free University of Tbilisi

Caucasian languages are well-known for their often baroque systems of

morphology, but when it comes to suppletion very little is known both

about how often Caucasian languages have suppletion, what features

undergo processes of suppletion, and whether patterns of suppletion show

areal or phylogenetic tendencies. This paper surveys various systems of

suppletion in Caucasian languages and finds both little evidence of

language contact resulting in suppletion, but also that suppletion arises only

in preexisting grammatical categories, and does not create new ones.

Once relegated to a theoretical periphery, studies of suppletion have increasingly come to

the fore in recent years. This results from several changes in the field. First, more and more

descriptive grammars and corpora of widely diverse languages have been published and become

widely available in recent years, so that statistically less frequent morphological phenomena are

now more visible to scholars than they used to be. But it arguable that another second change

has occurred, and this is that students of morphology increasingly realize the importance of

liminal morphological constructions for understanding how whole morphological systems work

in general.

The study of suppletion in Caucasian languages clearly exemplifies both trends. The

widely diverse languages from the Caucasus have long been by-words for morphological

complexity, but more often because of the number and organization of their inflectional

categories. As more and more grammars of Caucasian languages come to light, we have an

increasingly better idea of where the Caucasus fits in the typology and areal distribution of

morphological systems.

§1. What is suppletion? Problems of definition

Traditionally, scholars have defined suppletion diachronically: suppletive stems are

paradigms characterized historically by roots from more than one lexical item mixed together1.

Thus we regularly see examples cited like those in (1):

(1) a. English: go vs. went (< OE gān vs. wendan)

b. French: vais /ve/ allons /alõ/ (< L vadere vs. ambulare)

c. Georgian: mi-di-s mi-vid-a (< PK *din- vs. *wed-/wid-)

PVB-go.PRES-3SG PVB-go.AOR.3-3SG

‘he goes’ ‘she went’

1 See Conway (1909: 19) and Gray (1933: 84).

[DRAFT:] Suppletion in the Languages of the Caucasus

Though the word suppletion itself is only a little over a century old, this now traditional

definition of suppletion captures the intuition that indeed an individual root within a suppletive

paradigm often coexists with separate lexical items where that same root constitutes a fully

regular stem. Thus English went is historically related to a separate verb wend, and the

Georgian root დი- di- used in the present tense of ‘go’ exists alongside the verb დინება dineba

‘flow’, still in use.

However, in recent decades, scholars of suppletion (Melchuk 1994, Veselinova 2006)

have begun to question this diachronic definition, for at least three reasons. First, even in the

best documented language families, etymologies of individual roots are often disputed, and at

times entirely unknown. Thus nononomatopoetic words like askance or turmoil in English or

even a truly basic word like bad may have no certain origin (XX). Imposing diachrony on

synchronic facts likewise can lead to spurious descriptions of living languages, as famously in the

Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1965) when the facts of the Great Vowel Shift

were recapitulated in the form of synchronic phonological rules. Finally, typologically speaking,

we understand the history of too few languages to have a comparable understanding of their

etymological origins. An example of these facts that is close to home comes from a comparison

of the English vs. German present tense forms of the verb ‘be’/ ‘sein’:

(2) English vs. German ‘be’

ENGLISH GERMAN

SG PL SG PL

1 am are bin sind

2 are are bist seid

3 is are ist sind

From a synchronic perspective, all the forms of these verbs in both languages are highly

irregular, and cannot be predicted by the morphological facts of the contemporary spoken

languages; children learning to speak their first language must simply memorize them. Yet

historically, they were formed in quite distinct ways: despite their current irregularity, all the

forms of the English verb be go back to a single Indo-European root *es-, while the German

forms of sein go back to two distinct Indo-European roots (XX): *bheu- (for first and second

person singular forms) and *es- (for the other four forms). Thus Rudes (1980) calls the English

pattern ‘pseudo-suppletive’, while only the German pattern is truly suppletive. Melchuk (1994)

objects to the contradictions such a definition imposes, since not only does it make constructions

that are usually not considered suppletive into suppletive patterns, it also imposes the inverse of

not finding suppletion where a synchronic analysis might suggest that there is. Such a case is

the Russian feminizing suffix –ica/-ixa:

(3) Russian feminizing suffix –ica/-ixa (Melchuk 1994: 362)

‘elephant’ ‘tiger’ ‘donkey ‘cow’

MASC slon tigr osël byk

FEM slon-ixa tigr-ica osl-ica korova


In this case, a suffix has been added to masculine forms to create feminine forms, which creates

what appears to be a nice derivational paradigm. However, words such as byk ‘bull’ and korova

‘cow’ which have the same semantic relationship as slon ‘elephant’ and slonixa ‘elephantess’ are

usually not considered to stand in a suppletive relationship with each other on the grounds that

we know historically they existed in the Russian lexicon long before the appearance of the

feminizing suffix. Thus suppletion has often been in the eye of the beholder.

Besides such cases where the two stems share little or no phonological material, there is

also the problem of cases where two roots within one paradigm have some partial phonological

similarity, and how much similarity can vary greatly from one lexeme to another, and even

within lexemes. Thus English good is strongly suppletive with respect to better, but better is

itself only weakly suppletive with respect to best. In his 1985 article ‘Suppletion in Word-

formation’, to address such issues, Wolfgang Dressler articulated an eight-fold typology of

phonological transparency, depending on what kind of (morpho)phonemic processes given

forms undergo. [More discussion?]

Table 1. Dressler’s Eight levels of morphological transparency

I II III IV

Intrinsic PR intervene Neutralizing PRs Morphophonemics

allophonic PR: e.g. resyllabification e.g. flapping (no fusion)

excite+ment exist+ence writ+er electric+ity

V VI VII VIII

Morphophonemics MR intervene Weak Suppletion Strong suppletion

(w/ fusion) e.g. English Great childr+en (no rules)

conclusion vs. Vowel shift child be, am, are, is, etc.

conclude decide vs. decision

Thus what appears to be a discrete phenomenon is in fact considerably more gradient

than it first appears, since it is not clear that a principled distinction can be made between

weakly and strongly suppletive stem forms. What remains then is a definition of suppletion

along the lines of Melchuk (1994: 343):

(4) “Suppletion is a relation between signs X and Y such that the semantic difference... between

X and Y is maximally regular...while the phonological difference is maximally irregular.”

Hippisley et al. (2004) argue that suppletion on this definition has at least three properties

relevant for our study. First, suppletion typically occurs in high frequency tokens such as

copulas or verbs of possession. Second, perhaps less obviously, suppletion tends to occur for

categories that are inherent properties of a lexical item, rather than contextually determined by

syntax (Boiij 1996). Thus inherent categories typically found in nouns would be number or

definiteness or gender, while tense, aspect or mood are categories that typically inhere in verbs.

Case on the other hand is a property of nouns that nouns acquire from their syntactic context,

just as number and person usually do for verbs. Lastly, suppletion typically also only occurs in

preexisting categories or paradigmatic patterns that exist in a language; new instances of


suppletion will not create new categories or new paradigms de novo. All of these properties will

come to the fore in the following discussion of Caucasian suppletive patterns.

§2. SURVEY SOURCES

Figure 1. Map of Caucasian languages. (XX)

Some seventy or so languages are found in the Caucasus, and for increasingly many of

them extensive descriptive grammars exist. However, many grammars do not discuss suppletive

paradigms, and if they do, they do not always use an explicit definition, or do so for all parts of

speech, or distinguish weak or marginal forms of suppletion from the stronger, less controversial

types. Thus it is not always straight-forward to identify instances in the literature.

Another issue is even more basic: what is a Caucasian language? At least six language

phyla have considerable speaker populations in the modern Caucasus: Abkhaz-Adyghean,

Altaic, Kartvelian, Indo-European, Nakh-Daghestanian, and (somewhat marginally) Semitic. In

some cases, languages are known not to be indigenous to the region and arrived relatively

recently: there were virtually no large numbers of Russian or Ukrainian speakers before the end

of the 18th century. In other cases, as with Armenian or Ossetic, nonautochthonous language

communities arrived many centuries before the establishment of a historical tradition in the

region, to such an extent that their languages have come in many ways to resemble the

languages already spoken in the Caucasus. So for purposes of this survey, we will somewhat

arbitrarily restrict ourselves to instances of apparent suppletion from those languages claimed to

be ‘autochthonous’ to the region: Abkhaz-Adyghean (AA), Kartvelian (K) and Nakh-

Daghestanian (ND). Languages included in the survey are:


LANGUAGE SOURCE

Abkhaz (Abkhazic; AA) Chirikba (2003), Chirikba (2008)

Archi (Lezgic; ND) Hippisley (2004); Chumakina et al. (2007);

Avar (Avar-Andic; ND) Forker (classnotes)

Chechen (Nakh; ND) Molochieva (2011)

Georgian (K) Aronson (1982), Aronson (1998), Aronson (p.c.), Hewitt (1995),

Wier (fieldnotes)

Godoberi (Avar-Andic; ND) Forker (classnotes)

Ingush (Nakh; ND) Nichols (2011)

Kabardian (Adyghean; AA) Colarusso (1992)

Khinalug (Khinalug; ND) Forker (classnotes)

Khwarshi (Tsezic; ND) Khalilova (2009)

Kryts (Lezgic; ND) Authier (2009); Forker (classnotes)

Laz (Zan; K) Lacroix (XX);

Lezgian (Lezgic; ND) Haspelmath (1993)

Megrelian (Zan; K)

Svan (K) Schmidt (1991), Palmaitis and Gudjedjiani (1986)

Tsez (Tsezic; ND)

Tsova-Tush (Nakh; ND) Holisky & Gagua (1994)

Ubykh (AA) Chirikba (2008), Chirikba (p.c.)

Udi (Lezgic; ND) Schülze-Fürhoff, Wolfgang (1994)

The rest of this survey will be organized as follows. We will examine different kinds of

suppletion by part of speech: first verbs, then nouns, and any other salient syntactic categories.

For each part of speech, we will also examine constructions feature by feature. After that we

will examine whether there are any systematic gaps in the distribution of features, or families,

and ask if any such tendencies result from language contact, or more general cross-linguistic

typological tendencies.

PART I: QUALITATIVE EVIDENCE: VARIETIES OF SUPPLETION IN THE CAUCASUS

§3. Verbal suppletion

3.1 Tense

One language from the region that is particularly rich in tense suppletion is Georgian,

and this is both because of the sheer number of suppletive verbs as well as their paradigmatic

properties. In comparison to some Nakh-Daghestanian languages, Georgian is not particularly

well-endowed with tense oppositions (present, future, imperfect, aorist, and perfect), and

suppletion only occurs in a subset of these. However, the relationships these verbs have with

one another bear inspection, because they provide hints to the ways suppletion can arise.


Table 2. Georgian Suppletive Tense Forms. (Aronson 1998: 374-75; Hewitt 1995: 446-494)

Present Future Aorist Perfect

‘be’ ar-is i-kn-eb-a i-q’-o q’op-il-a

‘have INAN’ a-kv-s e-kn-eb-a stem missing2 h-kon-i-a

‘have ANIM’ h-q’-av-s e-q’ol-eb-a e-q’ol-a h-q’ol-i-a

‘go (away)’ mi-di-s mi-v-a3 mi-vid-a mi-sul-a

‘go’ da-di-s da-i-vl-i-s da-iar-a da-u-vl-i-a

‘say’ amb-ob-s i-t’q’v-i-s tkv-a u-tkv-am-s

‘tell’ e-ubn-eb-a e-t’q’v-i-s u-txr-a u-tkv-am-s

‘drink’ sv-am-s da-l-ev-s da-l-i-a mi-sv-am-s/da-u-l-ev-i-a

‘carry’ mi-a-kv-s mi-i-t’an-s mi-i-t’an-a mi-u-t’an-i-a

‘take INAN’ mi-a-kv-s c’a-mo-i-ğ-eb-s c’a-mo-i-ğ-o c’a-mo-u-ğ-i-a

‘take ANIM’ mi-u-q’av-s mi-u-q’van-s mi-u-q’van-a mi-u-q’van-i-a

‘be lying’ c’ev-s i-c’v-eb-a i-c’v-a c’ol-il-a

‘lie down’ c’v-eb-a da-c’v-eb-a da-c’v-a da-c’ol-il-a

‘give’ a-dzl-ev-s mi-s-c-em-s mi-s-c-a mi-u-c-i-a ‘do’ švr-eb-a i-zam-s kn-a u-kn-i-a

‘do to’ u-švr-eb-a u-zam-s u-q’-o u-kn-i-a

‘see’ xed-av-s nax-av-s nax-a u-nax-av-s

To see this, we must break apart this interlocking web of verbal roots. In most cases, a

given root is found in more than one tense form, usually resulting in just a two-way opposition:

carry, take, give, see. Other verbs have a three-way opposition (say but not tell, do but not do to, go) or a four-way opposition (be, go away, tell), but what is really interesting is how patterns

of suppletion distinguish one verb from another. Go away and plain go have identical roots in

the present, but all other tenses have suppletive roots, and those roots not only differ from each

other but also in how suppletive they are. A similar difference exists between say and tell, except that in this case the perfect forms are actually fully identical in other morphology as well.

Some roots, such as kn- ‘be/have.INAN/do’ show up in multiple verb paradigms with rather

different basic meanings, q’- ‘be/have.ANIM/do to’, but not in consistent tenses across verb forms.

kn-, for example, marks future tense for be and have (something inanimate), while that same

root marks the aorist and perfect for do, but just the perfect for do to. The latter’s aorist is in

turn marked by q’-, which is also found in the aorist of be, but the present of have (something animate). In some cases, these patterns of suppletion have relatively clear historical

explanations: kn- and kon- were historically the same root distinguished by ablaut, and q’ol-

was originally q’- plus a participial suffix *-Vl (XX).

Georgian is not alone in the Caucasus in having extensive tense suppletion. Udi, a Nakh-

Daghestanian language of the Lezgic branch, has a wide array of tenses that rely on three

different stems, plus a fourth for imperatives:

2 This stem forms its past tense with the imperfect, which is also suppletive: h-kon-d-a, ‘he had it’, having the same stem as the

perfect. 3 This root might be argued to be the same as –vl-, as the third plural would be mi-vl-en. See (8) below.


Table 3. Suppletion in Udi tense/mode forms (slightly modified from Harris 2002: 42)

TENSE/MOOD

FORM

‘come’ ‘go out’ ‘go’ ‘cook,

boil’

(INTR)

‘say’ ‘eat’ ‘die’

Present e-Ø č’e-Ø ta(y)-Ø box-Ø ex- uk- bi-

Imperfect e-Ø č’e-Ø ta(y)-Ø box-Ø ex- uk- bi-

Aorist I a-r- č’e-r ta-c- box-c- p- k- p’ur-

Aorist II a-r- č’e-r ta-c- box-c- p- k- p’ur-

Perfect a-r- č’e-r ta-c- box-c- p- k- p’ur-

Future I e-γ č’e-γ ta-γ- box-eγ- uk’- uk- bi-

Future II e-γ č’e-γ ta-γ- box-eγ- uk’- uk- bi-

Optative I e-γ č’e-γ ta-γ- box-eγ- uk’- uk- bi-

Optative II e-γ č’e-γ ta-γ- box-eγ- uk’- uk- bi-

Imperative e-k’e- č’e-k’e- ta-k’e- box-ek’e- up-/uk’- uk- ?

As with Georgian, some basic verb stems are extensively suppletive (‘come’, ‘go out’),

while others are less so (‘eat’, ‘die’). However Udi’s system of suppletion is rather different from

Georgian in at least two ways. First, while underived verbs stems in Georgian are, like most

languages, an open class, in Udi they are not. Instead, Udi uses a system of thirty or so light

verbs to which other elements (noun, verb, or other stems) are incorporated (Harris 2002: 65):

(n) a. pasčağ-on ğar-muğ-on lašk’o-q’un-b-esa

king-GEN son-PL-ERG wedding-3PL-DO-PRES

‘The king’s sons married [the girls they had rescued].’

b. nana-n tur-ex oc’-ne-k’-e

mother-ERG foot-DAT2 wash-3SG-LV-AORII

‘Mother washed her foot.’

c. k’al-le-p-e väkil-vazir-ğ-o

call-3SG-SAY-AORII counselor-vizier-PL-DAT1

‘He called his counselors…’

The interesting implication of this system is how it indirectly makes an extensive and

productive part of the Udi verbal lexicon suppletive, because new verbs can generally only be

formed from this limited set of light verbs, of which some are suppletive.

A second unusual characteristic, related to the first, is that some suppletive stems have a

zero allomorph as one suppletive alternant: thus bo<ne>x-sa [boil.3SG-PRES] ‘it is boiling it’ vs.

box-eğ-al-le [boil-GO-FUT-3SG] ‘it will boil’.4 This thus creates the typologically unusual

situation in which a verb stem such as box- ‘boil’ can appear superficially to be underived and

nonsuppletive in the present and imperfect tenses, when an investigation of other verb tenses

4 bo<ne>x-sa also features endocliticization of the person marker –ne which, though fascinating, is not directly involved

in the suppletion process.


would reveal that it in fact it is engaging in a more complicated system of paradigm formation

that indeed involves suppletion.

3.2 Aspect

Grammaticalized aspectual distinctions are found frequently in the languages of the

Caucasus (XX, YY, ZZ), but in many cases these aspectual contrasts are formed by the addition

of a preverb or some other part of morphology. In Georgian, for example, most verbs take one

of half a dozen or so perfectivizing preverbs, the absence of which indicates the action has not

been completed. As with Russian, the addition of present tense morphology renders a future

tense reading:

Perfective (Aorist) Imperfective (Present) Perfective (Future)

(n) a. da-c’er-a c’er-s da-c’er-s

PVB-write-AOR3SG write-3SG PVB-write-3SG

‘He wrote it’ ‘She’s writing it’ ‘He will write it’

b. ga-a-k’et-a a-k’et-eb-s ga-a-k’et-eb-s

PVB-PRV-do-AOR3SG PRV-do-TH-3SG PVB-PRV-do-TH-3SG

‘She did it’ ‘He’s doing it’ ‘She will do it’

Suppletion for such forms does exist, but it is rather rare. The clearest example is found

in (n), where the perfective/imperfective opposition is formed with different stems rather than

with the productive system of perfectivizing preverbs:

(n) nax-a xed-av-s nax-av-s

see.PF-AOR3SG see.IMPF-TH-3SG see.PF-TH-3SG

‘He saw it’ ‘She sees it’ ‘He will see it’

[Other Kartvelian examples?]

Outside Kartvelian, suppletion for aspectual distinctions is found most frequently in the

Nakh languages. Chechen has at least four different kinds of verbal aspect: imperfective,

perfective, second perfective (an evidential form for witnessed events), and iterative. In most

cases, the alternations between particular stems are indicated by ablaut patterns, though a larger

range of aspectual distinctions can be made by suffixation. As is clear from the examples in (n),

the distinction between weakly suppletive ablauting forms, such as ‘rub’, with those that are

more clearly strongly suppletive such as ‘hit’ and ‘carry’ is not always easy to pin down. This is

because the vowel matrix may be quite regular across several lexemes (e.g. the iterative

infinitive, the iterative imperative and the perfective iterative), while the ablauting pattern in

other parts of the same lexemes’ might differ greatly – not to mention the consonantal tier.


(n) Chechen aspect suppletion (Nakh/Nakh-Daghestanian; Molochieva 2011: 104):

‘rub’ ‘hit’ ‘carry’ ‘lift’

Infinitive hwaaq- tuoxa- daa- ai’a-

Imperfective hwooq- tuux- dahwa- oi’u-

Perfective 1 hwaeq- toex- de’a- ai’i-

Perfective 2 hwaeq- tyyx- de’a- ai’i-

Inf Iterative hwieq- diett- qiehwa- ii’a-

Imp Iterative hwoeq- doettu- qoehw- yy’u Pf Iterative hwiiq- diiti- qiihw- ii’i-

Another Nakh language which shows the same generalization more strikingly is Tsova-Tush

(AKA Batsbi). Like Chechen, this language has a perfective/imperfective aspectual opposition

which is manifest partly in internal vowel change operations, but also in other unpredictable

changes to stem form. While some pairs, such as that for ‘read’ or ‘drink’ in (na-b) use only

vowel ablaut to distinguish perfective from imperfective stems, others such as (ne) or (ng) show

unpredictable insertion of consonants or gender agreement markers, making it difficult to

distinguish between ablaut proper and suppletion on traditional definitions.

(n) Tsova-Tush (im)perfective verb stems (Nakh/Nakh-Daghestanian; Holisky and Gagua

1994: 161; 179):

Gloss Perfective Imperfective a. ‘read’ xat:ar xet:ar

b. ‘drink’ małar mełar

c. ‘pour out’ d-ot:ar d-et:ar

d. ‘put in’ d-ol:ar d-eblar

e. ‘hit, strike’ toxar tepxar

f. ‘see (sth)’ d-agar guar

g. ‘break (sth)’ d-ʕogar q’egar

h. ‘buy, take (sth)’ ecar ev-d-ar

3.3 Person

Inflection for person features differs considerably from one family to another in the

Caucasus. While agreement for person is found in a rather straightforward form in Abkhaz-

Adyghean languages, and person inflection is fundamental in all Kartvelian languages, person

plays a relatively limited role in Nakh-Daghestanian languages, whose agreement systems

mostly involve the gender and number of arguments. It is thus not surprising then that

suppletion for person features is most prominent in Kartvelian and much less well-established in

the other two families; no person-based suppletive patterns were found in the other two families

within the sample. To see this, we should examine the Kartvelian system a little further. In

inflectional morphology, Kartvelian languages all feature an opposition between first and second


persons taken as a natural class (here, depicted as the top of the pyramid), and third person

singular and third person plural (the left and right feet of the pyramid respectively):

(n) Georgian present and future person/number suffixes (Aronson 1982: 470)

-Ø -i

-s -en, -an -a, -is -ian

(trans. and unerg. verbs) (unaccusative verbs)

(n) Georgian aorist and optative person/number suffixes (Aronson 1982: 471)

AORIST OPTATIVE

-e -o

-a, -o -nen -os -on

(trans. and unerg. verbs)

Given this robust pattern that occurs in paradigm after paradigm, and in language after

language within the family, it is not surprising that suppletive patterns also follow it. For

example, we have already seen examples of weak suppletion in tense formation in Georgian, but

in some cases those same roots also participate in person-based suppletive constructions. In (n)

we see one such case, in which the root v- in the third person singular occurs alongside two

other roots vl-, in the third person plural, and val-, in the first and second persons.

(n) Future Paradigm for misvla ‘go (away)’ vs. dasvla ‘go (about)’

SG PL SG PL

1 mi-val mi-val-t da-v-i-vl-i da-v-i-vl-i-t

2 mi-x-val mi-x-val-t da-i-vl-i da-i-vl-i-t

3 mi-v-a mi-vl-en da-i-vl-is da-i-vl-ian

This construction is interesting not only for the pattern of suppletion it presents – the suppletion

matches the general inflectional pattern exactly – but also because one of these roots, vl-, exists

as the consistent root of a different verb with a slightly different meaning, which on its own

cannot be said to show any kind of suppletion at all. Perhaps the most suppletive verb in terms

of person is jdoma ‘be seated’, which features multiple kinds of cross-cutting suppletion across

tense, mood, person and number:


(n) Paradigm of jdoma ‘be seated’ (Hewitt 1995: 454)

PRESENT FUTURE AORIST OPTATIVE

1SG v-zi-var v-jd-eb-i v-i-jek-i v-i-jd-e

2SG zi-xar i-jd-eb-i i-jek-i i-jd-e

3SG zi-s i-jd-eb-a i-jd-a i-jd-es

1PL v-sxed-var-t v-i-sxd-eb-i-t v-i-sxed-i-t v-i-sxd-e-t

2PL sxed-xar-t i-sxd-eb-i-t i-sxed-i-t i-sxd-e-t

3PL sxed-an i-sxd-eb-ian i-sxd-nen i-sxd-nen

This verb presents a number of complications. The root zi- appears in the present

singular, and does not supplete for person as such, but does belong to an unusual cluster of verbs

which synchronically have special person suffixes historically related to the verb qopna ‘be’.

These verbs thus may have multiple exponence of the person feature, as they still make use of

the v- first person prefix. When we move to the plural, we find a completely different root

sxed-, and so we might be lead to believe this verb is suppletive only in number. In fact, when

we move to other tenses, we find that this verb alternates suppletively in other ways. In the

future, we see a root jd- and another root sxd-, which also occur in the aorist, except whereas

these roots occur in all persons in the future, they only occur in the third person in the aorist.

In the aorist first and second persons, instead we see roots jek- and sxed-. Jdoma ‘be seated’ is

not the only verb that has such patterns; dajdoma ‘sit down’, dgoma ‘be standing’, adgoma

‘stand up’, c’ola ‘be lying’, and dac’ola ‘lie down’ also feature person splits. What’s interesting

about these patterns is that, like the forms of ‘go’ in (n), they conform to generalizations that

already exist in the language; there are no suppletive forms based on person which distinguish,

say, first or third person as opposed to the second person.

Before we leave our discussion of person-based suppletive patterns, it’s worth pointing

out that other aspects of the Georgian verbal system also show suppletive-like patterns for

person. Although preverbs are usually not considered prime fodder for discussions of lexical

semantics, in Georgian they often carry an array of meanings above and beyond their most basic

meanings of directionality. Beyond also perfectivizing certain roots, they frequently carry lexical

meanings and nuances of the verb that cannot be entirely disentangled from the root, as can be

seen in (n):

(n) a. da-c’er-s (da-, indicating neutral or downward movement)

PVB-write-3SG

‘He will write it.’

b. ağ-c’er-s (ağ-, indicating upward movement)

PVB-write-3SG

‘He will describe it.’


c. gada-c’er-s (gada-, indicating movement across something)

PVB-write-3SG

‘He will copy it.’

This is relevant for our discussion of suppletion, because at least in the case of one verb, cema

‘give’, the preverbs change depending on the person of the primary object. For first and second

person primary objects, we see the preverb mo- (indicating motion toward a deictic center),

while for third person primary objects, we see the preverb mi- (indicating motion away from a

deictic center):

Table 3. Aorist Screeve Paradigm of cema ‘give’

Obj. →

Subj. ↓ 1st sg Pl 2

nd sg Pl 3

rd sg pl

1st

sg mo-g-e-c-i mo-g-e-c-i-t mi-v-e-c-i mi-v-e-c-i-t

Pl mo-g-e-c-i-t mo-g-e-c-i-t mi-v-e-c-i-t mi-v-e-c-i-t

2nd

sg mo-m-e-c-i mo-gv-e-c-i mi-e-c-i mi-e-c-i-t

Pl mo-m-e-c-i-t mo-gv-e-c-i-t mi-e-c-i-t mi-e-c-i-t

3rd

sg mo-m-c-a mo-gv-c-a mo-g-c-a mo-g-c-a-t mi-s-c-a mi-s-c-a

Pl mo-m-c-es mo-gv-c-es mo-g-c-es mo-g-c-es mi-s-c-es mi-s-c-es

Now, there is a clear reason why these particular preverbs might be found with these featural

specifications, as speech-act participants are clearly in some sense close to a deictic center (the

speech act), while nonspeech act participants might not be. However, other verbs in Georgian

do not have this pattern; this is restricted to the verb cema ‘give’. So do these count as

‘suppletive’ patterns both because of the way preverbs contribute to verbal lexical semantics,

and because of their highly grammaticalized, not to say fossilized, morphological patterning? If

so, they would clearly constitute a noncanonical case of suppletion not involving lexical roots, in

Corbett’s (2007) terms.

3.4 Number

In contrast to person, number is a category that is manifest in just about all languages in

all three indigenous families of the Caucasus; all the languages in the sample manifest it in some

part of their nominal or verbal agreement systems. In many cases, this extends to suppletion of

stems so that some argument (a subject for intransitive verbs, usually the direct object for


transitive verbs) will select a specific stem depending on the number of participants5, as for

example in Ubykh (n) and Tsova-Tush (n).

(n) Ubykh (Abkhaz-Adyghean; Chirikba 2008, Chirikba p.c.)

GLOSS SG PL

a. ‘sit’ s(ə)- ž˚a-

b. ‘stand, be somewhere’ t˚- x a-

c. ‘give’ t˚a- q’a-

(n) Tsova-Tush (aka Batsbi; Nakh/Nakh-Daghestanian; Holisky and Gagua 1994: 178)

GLOSS SG PL

a. ‘come’ d-aʔar d-axk’ar

b. ‘sit’ xaʔar xabžar

c. ‘put’ d-il:ar d-ixk’ar

d. ‘put down’ d-ol:ar d-oxk’ar

e. ‘hang something’ qoc’-d-ar qoxk’-d-ar

Usually such suppletion reflects both the semantic and the syntactic number of arguments, but

some cases are not so clear. In Ingush, for example, verbs inflect for the number of the

absolutive argument, and in cases where verbs have different stems for the number of that

argument, that is reflected in agreement, as in (n):

(n) Ingush (Nakh/Nakh-Daghestanian; Nichols 2011: 313)

a. Yz wa-xeira

3SG down-sit.WP

‘He sat down’

b. Yzh wa-xeishar

3PL down-sit.PL.WP

‘They sat down’

However, as with many languages of the Caucasus and around the world, quantified NPs are

morphologically singular, which creates the possibility of a conflict between the number of

semantic arguments and their syntactic encoding. In these contexts in Ingush, only the singular

verb stem is selected for:

(n) Yzh pxi sag wa-xeira / *wa-xeishar

DEM.PL five person down-sit.WP down-sit.PL.WP

‘Those five people sat down.’ (ibid.)

Ingush thus appears to be a language in which the stem selection is based on the overt

manifestation of syntactic features of the arguments, rather than the semantic properties of

those arguments. Georgian is another such language. We have already seen a number of such

5 Note that languages might supplete either for the number of participants or the number of events. See below for

further discussion.


stems above that suppleted for tense such as zi-/sxed- ‘be seated (SG/PL)’, and a number of others

supplete for the number of their object:

(n) Georgian SG/PL objects (Kartvelian; Aronson 1982: 406)

GLOSS OBJ SG OBJ PL

a. ‘throw, scatter’ gada-gd-eb-s gada-q’r-i-s

b. ‘set, put down’ da-sv-am-s da-sx-am-s

c. ‘slaughter’ da-k’l-av-s da-xoc-av-s

d. ‘put down’ da-d-eb-s da-a-c’q’-ob-s

e. ‘break’ ga-t’ex-s da-a-mt’vr-ev-s

Like Ingush, Georgian quantifiers induce singular morphology on the both the nouns and the

verbs they agree with, and this is true both of distributive and nondistributive quantifiers, as in

(n):

(n) a. q’vela k’ac-i (*k’ac-eb-i) dga-s (*dga-nan) ezo=ši

all.NOM man-NOM (*man-PL-NOM) stand-3SG (*stand-3PL) courtyard=in

‘All the men are standing in the courtyard.’

b. titoeul-i k’ac-i (*k’ac-eb-i) dga-s (*dga-nan) ezo=ši

each-NOM man-NOM (*man-PL-NOM) stand-3SG (*stand-3PL) courtyard=in

‘Each man is standing in the courtyard.’

However, there is some evidence that this suppletion is not for surface syntactic features, but

something more like a semantic conceptualization of distributivity. When we test such

quantification facts in (n) by adding a layer of syntactic structure, the suppletive stems manage

to control the possible outcome of quantification from within the embedded tough-construction

(Wier 2011: Ch 2):

(n) a. q’vela did-i kva ʒnel-i=a gada-sa-q’r-el-ad

all.NOM big-NOM stone.NOM hard-NOM-be.3SG PVB-FUT.PART-throw.PL-PART-ADV

‘All the big stones are hard to throw.’

b. *titoeul-i did-i kva ʒnel-i=a gada-sa-q’r-el-ad

each-NOM big-NOM stone.NOM hard-NOM- be.3SG PVB-FUT.PART-throw.PL-PART-ADV

‘Each of the big stones is hard to throw.’

c. *q’vela did-i kva ʒnel-i=a gada-sa-gd-eb-l-ad

all.NOM big-NOM stone.NOM hard-NOM- be.3SG PVB-FUT.PART-throw.SG-TH-PART-ADV

‘All of the big stones are hard to throw.’

d. titoeul-i did-i kva ʒnel-i=a gada-sa-gd-eb-l-ad

each-NOM big-NOM stone.NOM hard-NOM- be.3SG PVB-FUT.PART-throw.SG-TH-PART-ADV

‘Each of the big stones are hard to throw.’

In each sentence in (n), a tough-construction is formed by adding a tough-predicate ‘to be hard’

with a subordinate predicate marked as a future participle in the adverbial case. Because each of

the nouns is quantified, both the number of the noun and the upper verb (here a clitic form of


‘be’, =a) are singular in each example. However, only two rather than three of the examples are

ungrammatical: the distributive quantifier titoeuli ‘each, every’ is incompatible with the

suppletive verb form gadaq’ra ‘throw PL’ that selects plural objects, while the nondistributive

quantifier q’vela ‘all’ is incompatible with the suppletive verb form gadagdeba ‘throw SG’ that

selects singular objects. What these two examples show is that the suppletion for number is not

so much concerned with the surface syntactic number of the arguments – (na) is grammatical

despite being formally singular – as their semantic distributivity: gadaq’ra selects for masses of

objects, while gadagdeba selects for individualizable objects. Masses of objects just happen often

to be plural in number, while individualizable objects are often depicted as singulars. Such facts

may also extend to other languages of the Caucasus, though the relevant tests have not been

done.

3.5 Mood

Of Caucasian languages in the sample, a great many have dedicated paradigms to mark

predicates that do not make truth-assertions about the world as it currently is, was or will be.

This is true of all three indigenous families, although the number and use of modal forms varies

from family to family and language to language. Kartvelian languages typically have optatives

and evidential forms of verbs, while Abkhaz-Adyghean languages have a diverse array of modal

affixes, including (in Abkhaz) optatives, detrimentals, subjunctives, nonvolitionals, inferentials,

and obligatives. Only in Nakh-Daghestanian, however, do we see strong suppletion in modal

forms. Ingush for example distinguishes immediate from distant imperatives with special

suppletive forms in the verb ‘come’, which may be considered both suppletive from their

respective indicative forms, and from each other:

(n) Ingush paradigm for ‘come’ (Nakh/Nakh-Daghestanian; Veselinova 2006: 137, citing

Nichols p.c.)

INDICATIVE IMPERATIVE

PRES d-oagha d-iel (come right now!)

FUT d-oaghaddy d-oula (come sometime later!)

In Kryz (Lezgic/Nakh-Daghestanian; Authier 2009) a number of verbs supplete in a variety of

different moods. One class of verbs form their negative forms with a prefix da- before the root,

and in at least two cases the root that follows is specific to the negative (ibid. 152):

POSITIVE NEGATIVE

(n) a. manger [eat] ugul-a-yc de-yl-ic

b. laver [wash] zim-a-yc da-zn-ic

Kryz has a prohibitive mode to indicate injunctions not to do a particular action (i.e., distinct

from a negated imperative). Such forms are usually formed morphomically from the

imperfective stem plus a prefix m- (ibid. 154). Compare the regular forms in (n) with the

suppletive forms in (n):


IMPERFECTIVE PROHIBITIVE

(n) a. prendre [put] ğa-n-i ğa-ma-nu(/-vay)

b. traîner [pull] si-ç-i si-ma-çu(/-vay)

(n) a. faire [do] yiyi mi’u(ay)

b. dire [say] liyi mi’u(ay)

3.6 Animacy and Gender

Caucasian languages differ greatly when it comes to lexical categories like animacy or

gender. Kartvelian languages show almost no evidence of animacy or gender at any level, while

among Abkhaz-Adyghean languages only the Abkhaz-Abaza branch shows any inflection for

gender or nominal class of any kind, and here it is clearly an innovation. In most Nakh-

Daghestanian languages, by contrast, gender is the life and soul of morphosyntax, with most

languages having at least four and some languages having as many as eight grammatical genders.

These genders are reflected in verbal, adjectival and in some languages adverbial agreement.

Surprisingly, however, verbal suppletion for gender among these languages is quite rare; most

cases would be qualified as weak rather than strong suppletion, e.g. the paradigm of ‘go’ in Kryz

(Authier 2009: 159):

(n) PAST PERF. PAST PERF. NEG.

M/N yi-xh-i di-xh-i

F/Hpl yi-p-i di-p-i

In this paradigm, an original feminine sequence *yi-b-xh-i with a root xh- ‘go’ and a feminine

agreement suffix –b has undergone internal assimilation, so that now the root p- indicates both

gender and lexical information6. Outside Nakh-Daghestanian, in the Caucasus there are only

two apparent cases of suppletion for gender or nominal class, both coming from Georgian:

(n) Georgian

GLOSS INANIMATE OBJ ANIMATE OBJ

a. ‘have’ a-kv-s h-q’-av-s

b. ‘carry, take’ mi-i-t’an-s c’a-i-q’van-s

In these two cases, if the object of the verb is either semantically animate or motile, then the

animate verb hq’avs or c’aiq’vans must be used, while if the object is neither animate or motile,

then akvs or miit’ans must be used (see Wier 2011 Chs 2 and 5 for more discussion).

However, there are at least two reasons to believe that these suppletion patterns function

differently from those of Nakh-Daghestanian. Firstly, gender assignment in Nakh-Daghestanian

languages is for the most part wholly formal: nouns belong to discrete classes, and the

assignment of nouns to those classes combines semantic with morphological and phonological

criteria as in, say, French or German. Georgian nouns on the other hand do not clearly belong to

such discrete gender classes, as one and the same noun could in principle select for either the

6 As far as I know, such a process of assimilation is not general in Kryz.


animate or inanimate verb depending on its interpretation (Rusudan Asatiani, p.c.; Wier 2011

Ch. 5):

(n) a. kalak-s h-q’-av-s or-i cxen-i moedan-ši

city-DAT 3DAT-have.ANIM-TH-3SG two-NOM horse-NOM square-in

‘The city has two [live, biological] horses in the square.’

b. kalak-s a-kv-s or-i cxen-i moedan-ši

city-DAT PRV-have.INAN-TH-3SG two-NOM horse-NOM square-in

‘The city has two [equestrian statues of] horses in the square.’

In the normal situation, ‘horses’ are biological entities and so speakers would by default use the

verb that selects for an animate object. However, if the horses in question are actually inanimate

(e.g. equestrian statues or toys), use of the verb selecting inanimate objects is possible. In fact,

this interpretive form of animacy can be systematic, as when live animals select for the animate

verb, while dead forms of the same animals select for the inanimate verb (Khizanashvili XX):

(n) a. bat’-i m-q’av-d-a sa-q’var-el cxovel-ad

goose-NOM 1SG-have.ANIM-IMPF-3SG FUT.PART-love-PART.ADV animal-ADV

‘I had a goose for a pet.’

b. bat’-i m-kon-d-a sadil=ze

goose-NOM 1SG-have.INAN-IMPF-3SG dinner=on

‘I had goose for dinner.’

Thus, as with suppletive pairs selecting for the number of objects, what seems to be relevant in

the Georgian case is not what formal syntactic features the nouns bear, but the cognitive

representation of events.

Secondly, another way in which these verbs differ from the Nakh-Daghestanian situation

is that the doublet akvs / hq’avs in particular is also used to form nonevidential resultative

perfect forms of verbs:

(n) a. m-a-kv-s es c’ign-i c’a-k’itx-ul-i samk’itxelo=ši

1SG-PRV-have.INAN-3SG this.NOM book-NOM PVB-read-PART-NOM reading.room=in

‘I have read this book in the reading room.’

b. m-q’-av-s es ʒağl-i na-nax-i kuča=ze

1SG-have.ANIM-TH-3SG this.NOM dog-NOM PART-see.PF-NOM street=on

‘I have seen this dog in the street.’

Thus, as in the case with Udi incorporated auxiliaries, because a suppletive contrast here has

acquired a grammaticalized function to mark resultative perfects, and all transitive and

unergative intransitive verbs use these verbs to form their resultative perfects, a suppletive

contrast has indirectly entered into the core of Georgian grammar contrary to an understanding

of suppletion as a peripheral morphosyntactic phenomenon.


§4. Nominal suppletion

Cross-linguistically, nominal suppletion tends to pattern somewhat differently from

verbal suppletion for the simple reason that nouns tend to be marked for different inherent

categories than verbs do. While verbs tend to inflect for inherent categories like tense and

aspect, nominals tend to inflect for categories like number and gender, and only sometimes do

these categories present fertile ground for suppletive paradigm formation. Unlike verbs,

however, nominals frequently supplete for noninherent features such as case and possession,

categories which are commonplace across the region. Like verbs, suppletion among nominals

also tends to take place among high-frequency tokens, such as kinship terms, domesticated

animals, household tools, food, and among adjectival forms scalar descriptors like ‘good’, ‘big’,

etc.

4.1 Case

Although number is the most frequent form of nominal suppletion cross-linguistically

(Vafaeian 2013), within the region case seems to be at least as frequent. This is most obvious in

personal and demonstrative pronominal paradigms in Kartvelian and Nakh-Daghestanian,

where suppletion often distinguishes a more central ‘core’ stem from some kind of ‘oblique’

stem, though the actual definition of what constitutes a core stem and what constitutes an

oblique stem differs significantly from family to family and language to language. In all the

Kartvelian languages, the nominative, narrative (AKA ‘ergative’) and dative cases of pronouns all

share the same ‘core’ stem form (indeed, are indistinct), irrespective of their distribution in

syntax, which can vary greatly from one language to another; all other cases share a common

‘oblique’ stem.

Table X. Kartvelian pronominal forms.

1SG 2SG 1PL 2PL

CORE OBL CORE OBL CORE OBL CORE OBL

Georgian me čem- šen šen- čven čven- tkven tkven-

Mingrelian ma čkim- si skan- čki ckin- tkva tkvan-

Laz ma čkim-/škim- si skan- čku/šk’u čkun-/šk’un- tkva/t’k’va tkvan-,

t’k’van-

Svan mi mišgu, mišgwi si isgu näy, nä, nišgwe, sgäy, sgä, isgwe,

mišk’wi nay nišge sgay isge

Only in Georgian do we see a near complete collapse of this paradigmatic contrast, in the second

singular and first and second person plural. All the other forms show varying levels of weak or

strong suppletion.

Nakh-Daghestanian languages, too, regularly distinguish core from oblique stems of

(pro)nominals, but in these languages the contrast is almost always between an absolutive case

(and sometimes just the absolutive singular) on the one hand, and all other case forms on the

other, though in a number of languages the absolutive and ergative fall together, either in just

pronouns or in pronouns plus some common noun paradigms (Forker 2010).


Table X. Some Nakh-Daghestanian pronominal forms.

1SG 2SG 1PL (INCL) 2PL

ABS ERG ABS ERG ABS ERG ABS ERG

Avar dun dica mun duca niž nižeca nuž nužeca

Lezgian zun za wun wuna čun čna kün küne

Khinalug zy yä vy va yir yir zur zur

Tsez di di mi mi eli elā meži mežā

Kryts zi(n) zi(n) vun vun yin yin vin vin

Godoberi den den min min išːe išːe bitːé bitːé

In only two of these languages do we see suppletion in the first and second persons based on

case. However, if we look at larger paradigms we sometimes find suppletion that begins with

other cases, as with Udi and Andi, where the genitive forms of pronouns use a different stem in

the first person than the absolutive and ergative forms:

(n) Udi pronouns (Lezgic/Nakh-Daghestanian; Schulze 1994)

CASE 1SG 2SG 1PL 2PL

ABS/ERG zu un (<*wun) yan waʕn / efan

GEN bez(i) wi beš(i) eʕfi / efi

DAT1 za wa ya waʕ / e

ʕfa

ʕ

(n) Andi personal pronouns (Avar-Andic/Nakh-Daghestanian; Tsertsvadze 1965: 199, cited in

Hewitt 2004: 85)

CASE 1SG 2SG 1PL EXCL 1PL INCL 2PL

ABS din/den min/men išːil ikɬil bisːil

ERG din/den min/men išːidi ikɬidi bisːidi

GEN di-D du-D išːi-D ikɬi-D bisːi-D

DAT diy duy išːiy ikɬiy bisːiy

AFF di-D-o du-D-o išːi-D-o ikɬi-D-o bisːi-D-o

The Andi forms and the Udi forms both share the trait that suppletion for their ‘core’ forms and

their ‘oblique’ forms contrasts the absolutive and ergative on the one hand with the genitive on

the other. However, less obviously, they also share something else in common, and this is that

while the genitive and affective cases of the Andi pronouns inflect for gender (here marked with

a capital ‘D’), the Udi forms used to as well. While Udi has lost all inflection for gender, in Andi

these gender agreement patterns are still operative. In Udi, these inflections remain only as the

initial /b/ on the pronoun, which formerly marked agreement for the gender of the head noun.

This thus illustrates one important source of synchronic suppletion: the ossification of

previously functional inflectional material.

In some cases, nominal suppletion for case can be difficult to disentangle from suppletion

for gender and number. In Khinalug (an isolate within Nakh-Daghestanian), demonstratives

distinguish four genders in the singular, and two genders in the plural, but crosscutting these


suppletive patterns are also suppletions for case, in which singulars are sometimes superficially

similar to plural forms but in ways that cannot be stated as consistent morphological rules:

(n) Khinalug demonstrative pronouns (isolate within Nakh-Daghestanian; Schulze 2003: 304)

ABS ERG=GEN1 DAT

SG I du ği x u

II dä ğwi ğu

III dä si su

IV ǯi si su

PL I dur ğózi ğózu

II dur ğózi ğózu

III ǯith sédri sédru

IV ǯith sédri sédru

In (n), the absolutive features unquestionably strong suppletion for case in gender I in the

singular, but a weaker form of suppletion in the same gender in the plural, while the other

gender forms also feature various kinds of suppletion. What is interesting here though is that

patterns of suppletion across cases are actually what distinguish particular genders from each

other. It is in other words not the case that a root dä characterizes the second gender as distinct

from other genders, but the fact that this root in the absolutive is paired with a root ğwi in the

ergative and genitive, rather than si. Si is likewise paired with dä or ǯi to indicate the third and

fourth genders, respectively.

In other cases, the question is not so much of suppletive entanglement as suppletive

cleavage that presents the analyst with problems. Khwarshi (Tsezic/Nakh-Daghestanian) is

described in Khalilova (2009: 151) as having two interrogative pronouns: one for genders I and

II for humans (‘who’) and the other for genders III, IV and V (‘what’), but this is based on the

fact that one and the same form in the absolutive apparently bifurcates into two separate

suppletive paradigms in the oblique cases, as in (n):

(n) Khwarshi interrogative pronouns

‘who’ (I/II) ‘what’ (III/IV/V)

ABS hibo

ERG ɬu ɬene

GEN1 ɬiyo ɬene-s

GEN2 ɬu-lo ɬene-lo

LAT ɬu-l ɬene-l

So here again, the issue is the pattern of suppletion within the paradigms, but in this case it is

not the distribution of roots as a question of lexical entries. If we say there is one root for all

interrogatives in the absolutive, but two in two different sets of gender paradigms, then we face

an awkward cleavage in one part of the paradigm and an overlap in another. On the other hand,

if we separate out homophonous roots for each gender possibility, then we might in fact

envision a much more complicated paradigm along the following lines:


(n) Alternative Khwarshi interrogative paradigm

I II III IV V

ABS hibo hibo hibo hibo hibo

ERG ɬu ɬu ɬene ɬene ɬene

GEN1 ɬiyo ɬiyo ɬene-s ɬene-s ɬene-s

GEN2 ɬu-lo ɬu-lo ɬene-lo ɬene-lo ɬene-lo

LAT ɬu-l ɬu-l ɬene-l ɬene-l ɬene-l

That is to say, seen from the perspective of Khwarshi grammar, it is not obvious that there are

two lexical items more or less analogous to English ‘who’ and ‘what’ which happen to share the

same root in the absolutive, as opposed to five lexical items that all have a homophonous root in

the absolutive but with different genders sharing different roots in the other cases. This is

important, because as we saw with the Khinalug data in (n) above, how we identify suppletive

processes depends on our prior understanding of what the set of lexical items is, and how the

cells in their paradigm structures are organized.

Khwarshi provides other constructions that complicates our identification of suppletion.

As above and with many other Nakh-Daghestanian languages, oblique stems of regular nouns

are often portrayed as being formed by overt suffixes which have no syntactic or semantic

function, since they are purely morphological markers of paradigm formation. However,

although they are involved in the formation of case paradigms, they are clearly distinct from the

actual case forms, which are discretely segmentable from root plus oblique stem suffix, as in (n):

(n) Khwarshi oblique stem formation

GLOSS CORE STEM OBLIQUE STEM

a. ‘door’ anc a

nc-ma-la [door-OBL-GEN2]

b. ‘finger’ t’u tu-lá-la [finger-OBL-GEN2]

c. ‘she-goat’ can can-á-l [she.goat-OBL-LAT]

d. ‘father’ obu obu-t’-lo [father-OBL-GEN2]

e. ‘roof’ λ’u λ’u-n-lo [roof-OBL-GEN2]

f. ‘girl’ kad kand-ɨ-lo [girl.OBL-OBL-GEN2]

In each of the forms in (n), a separate suffix attaches to the root, which then provides the

input for the genitive case (which usually agrees in vowel height with the root). Because there

are so many distinct suffixes that can be used to form oblique stems, it is not easy in principle to

distinguish between the traditional analysis in which the core and oblique forms share a

common root but differ in their oblique suffix, and an alternative analysis in which the

distinction between core and oblique stems is systematically suppletive. The evidence that these

two analyses sit uncomfortably close to one another in the history of this language is that

sometimes the oblique suffixes can become incorporated into the verbal root itself, thereby

creating an unquestionably weakly suppletive stem alternation. The contrast between (ne) and

(nf) is an illustration of this: an original –n oblique suffix underwent metathesis for originally

purely phonological reasons. This was later morphologized (nasal metathesis is not systematic

in Khwarshi) producing the current suppletive alternation.


An even clearer case of productive weakly suppletive stem alternation comes from

Georgian, where many roots undergo what was traditionally seen as zero-grade ablaut (or

syncope) in some of their case forms (here, italicized). Consider the following case paradigms:

(n) Georgian

CASE ‘object’ ‘city’ ‘priest’ ‘general’ ‘god’

NOM sagan-i kalak-i mğvdel-i general-i ğmert-i

NARR sagan-ma kalak-ma mğvdel-ma general-ma ğmert-ma

DAT sagan-s kalak-s mğvdel-s general-s ğmert-s

GEN sagn-is kalak-is mğvdl-is generl-is ğvt-is/ğmert-is

INST sagn-it kalak-it mğvdl-it generl-it ğmert-it

ADV sagn-ad kalak-ad mğvdl-ad generl-ad ğmert-ad

VOC sagan-o kalak-o mğvdel-o general-o ğmert-o

Clearly, the locus of syncope was originally phonologically motivated, as the only cases that

undergo it are those with ‘heavy’ vowel+consonant sequences: the genitive, instrumental and

adverbial cases. This process can nonetheless not be described as a synchronically phonological

one, since otherwise metrically identical nouns like kalaki ‘city’ do not undergo this ablaut

process. As mğvdeli ‘priest’ shows, the ablaut process can also work to create phonologically

more marked structures, here by increasing the size of the (already large) initial onset cluster.

Even more clearly morphological are some syncopation alternations mentioned in Hewitt (1999:

35): tvali ‘eye’ does not syncopate (tvalis), but tvali ‘gemstone’ does (tvlis); k’ari ‘door’ does not

syncopate (k’aris), while in compounds like cisk’ari ‘dawn’, it does (cisk’ris), and so on.

In the Kartvelological literature this is usually not described as a suppletive process, in

part because it only weakly alters the stem to which the case suffix attaches – most would only

accept the single example of ğmerti ‘god’ which suppletes optionally, and only, in the genitive --

but also because it appears to be a productive process. New loan words can and often do undergo

the syncopating process, as instances like generali ‘general’ (shown above), limoni ‘lemon’,

rest’orani ‘restaurant’, panjara ‘window’, peršali ‘doctor’s assistant’, zeink’ali ‘machinist’, šakari ‘sugar’, and many others. In the light of the ill-defined nature of suppletive processes cross-

linguistically, it is a case in which our expectations about how a morphological process should

behave guide us in deciding what are cases of that process – a circular form of reasoning.

4.2 Number

As with case suppletion, number suppletion manifests an array of different kinds of

form-function pairings in the languages of the Caucasus. However, in the Caucasus, number

suppletion in nouns appears to be considerably rarer than suppletion for case. In Tsova-Tush,

for example, we see a variety of deviations from stem paradigmatic uniformity, most of which

result from diachronic phonological changes in the language. Thus in (nb), vocalic metathesis

obscures two otherwise similar noun stem forms for ‘knee’, and in many cases the loss of some

word final consonants creates stem contrasts, as with (nc). Only in a few cases, like (ne), are

strongly suppletive.


(n) Tsova-Tush (aka Batsbi, Nakh/Nakh-Daghestanian; Holisky and Gagua 1994: 164)

GLOSS SINGULAR PLURAL

a. ‘rooster’ mamal mamal-i

b. ‘knee’ gaugu

gagu-i

c. ‘day’ de den-iš

d. ‘daughter-in-law’ nus nas-ar-i

e. ‘man’ s’tak’ vaser

f. ‘star’ t’ʕeiri t’ʕeri-ar-iš t’ʕirelč

Archi presents a few more cases of nominal suppletion for number, and in these cases the

suppletion cannot be laid at the feet of phonology. The Archi stems are fully strongly suppletive,

resulting from the merger of two originally distinct nominal paradigms :

(n) Archi (Lezgic/Nakh-Daghestanian; Hippisley et al. 2004; Chumakina et al. 2007)

GLOSS SINGULAR PLURAL

a. ‘man, husband’ bošór kɬelé

b. ‘shepherd’ uɬdu ɬ:wat

c. ‘corner of sack’ bič’ní boždó

d. ‘woman’ ɬ:onnól xom

e. ‘cow’ xʕon buc:’i

f. ‘pier of bridge’ biq’ʕni boʁdó

Why would there be such a distinct lack of suppletion in number in Caucasian languages? One

feature that often distinguishes the languages of the Caucasus from more familiar Indo-European

languages is that case and number are often realized by separate morphological exponents. This

is more or less true of all the languages of the Caucasus – even including non-autochthonous

languages like Armenian and Ossetian – but its exact realization differs for different reasons in

different languages and families. In Kartvelian languages, fusional suffixes combining person and

plural number were replaced in all languages by an originally collective suffix plus the case

marking found on singulars: Old Georgian kartvel-ni Georgian-NOM.PL became Georgian

kartvel-eb-i ‘Georgian-PL-NOM’, and cf. Mingrelian kortu-ep-i ‘Georgian-PL-NOM’, etc. Abkhaz-

Adyghean languages typically do not have extensive case systems, but where they do manifest

both case and number, they typically have distinct exponents: cf. Kabardian gyaata-r [sword-ABS]

vs. gyaata-ha-r [sword-PL-ABS] (Colarusso 1992:51). Nakh-Daghestanian languages are usually

more complicated, in that they often employ distinct plural and oblique suffixes, neither of

which formally marks case, as with Archi:


(n) Archi stem formation: gel ‘cup’ (Forker classnotes)

base stem plural stem

gel gel-um cup cup-PL

oblique stem oblique plural stem

gel-li-s gel-um-če-s cup-OBL.SG-DAT cup-PL-OBL.PL-DAT

Such stem formation is more complicated than in Kartvelian or Abkhaz-Adyghean, in that

oblique suffixes are partially morphomic entities that simply build paradigms, but also bear

morphosyntactic features, such as number. However, in all three families, the exponence of

features in discrete slots is far more straightforward than in more familiar Indo-European

languages, since in most Caucasian languages (nominal) stems do not appear to bear features for

case or number as such. This raises the possibility of an implicational universal along the

following lines:

(n) A language will not manifest suppletive stem allomorphy if the ratio of features (number

and case) and exponents is close to a one-to-one correspondence.

The reasoning behind this seems to be that because (weakly) suppletive stem allomorphy so

frequently results from historical phonological change that obscures surface morphological

contrasts, if phonological changes have not occurred to obscure those contrasts, there simply are

not any discrepancies between phonology and morphology that can become morphologized.

Strong suppletive contrasts of the Archi type are thus reduced to the rarity of paradigmatic

conflation, rather than the rarity of suppletion as such.

4.3 Adnominals

Adjectival forms also often undergo suppletion in many languages, though in many

languages it is not clear that they constitute a distinct syntactic class from substantival nouns.

This is especially true in the Caucasus, where the distinction between nouns and adjectives is

weak at best and sometimes completely absent.

As in many European languages, languages of the Caucasus often manifest a

morphological contrast among scalar attributive nominals between at least two grades: positive

and comparative. In some languages, this contrast is weak or found only in some lexical items.

Thus in Georgian, an attributive like k’arg-i [good-NOM] has a comparative form u-k’et-es-i [COMP-good.COMP-COMP-NOM] and a superlative sa-u-k’et-es-o [SUP-COMP-good.COMP-COMP-

SUP], but this is the exception rather than the rule, as most adnominals have only positive and

comparative synthetic forms, some of which are suppletive:


(n) Georgian adnominals (Hewitt 1995: 49)

GLOSS POSITIVE COMPARATIVE (SUPERLATIVE)

a. ‘good’ k’arg-i u-k’et-es-i sa-u-k’et-es-o

u-mjob-es-i sa-u-mjob-es-o

b. ‘bad’ cud-i u-ar-es-i

c. ‘few’ cot’a na-kl’-eb-i

d. ‘many’ bevr-i met’-i u-met’-es-i

e. ‘sweet’ t’k’bil-i u-t’k’b-es-i

The related language Svan has an even larger number of adnominal degrees of comparison:

positive, approximative, comparative and superlative. Thus: c’ərni ‘red’, məc’ərna ‘reddish’, xo-c’ran-a ‘redder’ and ma-c’ran-e ‘reddest’. In some cases, adnominals also have suppletive

allomorphs, but not in the same sense as in Georgian. This is because for each of these suppletive

forms, there exist two positive forms, one of which might be regular (xoča xočēl) or

canonically suppletive (xola xodrēl), but the other will form its comparative based on the

first.

(n) Svan suppletive adnominals (Palmaitis XX: 52)

GLOSS POSITIVE COMPARATIVE

a. ‘good’ xoča xočēl

ezär

b. ‘bad’ xola xodrēl

leg

c. ‘big’ xoša xošēl

ʒɣəd

d. ‘small’ xoxwra xoxwrēl

k’ot’ōl

Thus, like the Khwarshi examples above, we are faced with the question of identifying exactly

how many lexical items are behaving suppletively. However, comparative constructions often

do not make use of actual comparative morphology throughout the languages of the Caucasus.

In most languages, an alternative construction exists in which the positive form of the

adnominal is used with the standard of comparison in some kind of oblique case, such as the

Lezgian example in (n), or with a postposition (as in nb). This is true even in those languages

such as Georgian which do have comparative/superlative morphology:

(n) Lezgian comparatives (Haspelmath 1993: 432)

I dünja.da-l qhsan-bur pis-bur.u-laj gzaf ja.

this world-SESS good-SBST.PL bad-SBST.PL-SREL many COP

‘In this world the good people are more numerous than the bad people.’


(n) a. K’onst’ant’ine Gamsaxurdia Sakartvelo-s sa-u-k’et-es-o

K. G. Georgia-GEN SUP-COMP-good.COMP-COMP-SUP

m-c’er-al-i=a

PART-write-PART-NOM=be.3SG

‘Konstantine Gamsaxurdia is Georgia’s best writer.’

b. Gamsaxurdia Dumbadze=ze k’arg-i=a

G. Dumbadze=on good-NOM=be.3SG

‘Gamsaxurdia is better than Dumbadze.’

In such languages, adnominal suppletion is rare or absent for the simple reason that the syntactic

context that licenses it is lacking.

4.4 Numeral suppletion

Like adnominals, numerals are in many languages around the world not a distinct

syntactic class from nominals, and this is also true of many Caucasian languages. However, just

as adnominals can be morphologically distinguished by being capable of comparative inflection,

numerals in most Caucasian languages distinguish cardinal from ordinal numbers

morphologically, and often additional categories such as multiplicatives, multipliers,

distributives and fractionals. However, suppletion among Caucasian languages appears to be

restricted to the relationship between cardinals and ordinals, as illustrated by the following

Kartvelian data:

(n) Georgian / Mingrelian

7 / Svan (Amirejibi 2006: 119; Schmidt 1994: 535)

GLOSS CARDINAL ORDINAL

a. ‘one’ erti / arti / ešxu p’irveli / maarta / määnk’wi,

p’irveli, ešxu

b. ‘two’ ori / žiri / yori meore / mažira / mērme

c. ‘three’ sami / sumi / semi mesame / masuma / mēsme

d. ‘four’ otxi / otxi / wōštwx meotxe / maotxa / ?

e. ‘five’ xuti / xuti / woxwišd mexute / maxuta / ?

In the case of Georgian, the word for ‘first’ might be a borrowing from some Indo-European

source, but if so it is an early loan, since it is found in Old Georgian. In the case of the Svan

ordinal for ‘one’, we see something somewhat different. Instead of an ordinal regularly formed

from mē-…-e, as with mēsme ‘third’ from semi ‘three’, we see three different forms: määnk’wi, a native suppletive form that may use the circumfix but with a different stem; p’irveli, a

suppletive form transparently borrowed from Georgian; and a bare form ešxu morphologically

indistinct from the cardinal form – the inverse phenomenon of määnk’wi. It is noteworthy that in each language, when suppletion arises, it arises in a linear

progression from ‘one’ upward. In other families, a similar pattern is found, as in the

7 Megrelian and Laz have different realizations of numbers, but they are formed in the same way.


Daghestanian language Khwarshi (n) and in the Abkhaz-Adyghean language Kabardian, where a

root that originally meant ‘face’ entered into the paradigm for one as an ordinal, alongside the

nonsuppletive form (n):

(n) Khwarshi (Tsezic/Nakh-Daghestanian; Khalilova 2009)


a. ‘one’ hos hada

b. ‘two’ q’ʕwene / q’

ʕwine q’

ʕwana

c. ‘three’ ħono ħal-la

d. ‘four’ unq’e u

nq’q’el-la

e. ‘five’ ɫino / ɫuno ɫul-la

f. ‘six’ enɫ e

nɫɫe-la

g. ‘seven’ oλ oλλe-la

(n) Kabardian (Abkhaz-Adyghean; Colarusso 1992)


a. ‘one’ zə yah-pa (pa- ‘face’) / ya-za-a-na

b. ‘two’ t’ʔwə, t’ə ya-t’ʔwa-a-na

c. ‘three’ śə ya-sa-a-na

d. ‘four’ p’λ’ə ya-p’λ’a-a-na

e. ‘five’ tx wə ya-tx

wa-a-na

Why would suppletion be so readily found across languages in this way? The answer clearly has

to do with frequency effects already known from previous studies of both suppletion and

numeral systems (XX, YY, ZZ). Although historical and corpus data from many Caucasian

languages are lacking, a simple look at their English equivalents shows that ordinals indeed can

have fairly constant frequencies over time:

Table X. Frequency of English ordinal numerals across time (Google N-gram)


Table X presents shows that although ordinals may change in frequency slightly over the

centuries, their relative frequency is remarkably stable: whatever the century, first is

approximately four times as frequent as second, second is approximately twice as frequent as

third, third about twice as frequent as fourth, and so on in rough conformity with Zipf’s Law.

Thus it is not surprising that instances of suppletion among Caucasian languages occur precisely

in those places where token frequency is greatest.

Part II. Phylogeny and Areality

§5. Areal Distribution

The above survey of suppletive processes in Caucasian languages has touched on a few of

the larger crosslinguistic implications of suppletion as a morphological process, but there is a

larger question surrounding suppletion, and this is that if suppletion is a feature of the lexicon as

has so often been assumed (XX, YY), then do we see extensive evidence of language contact as a

factor feeding the creation of suppletive processes, or is suppletion a phenomenon that arises

largely language-internally? The answer in most of the examples above seems to be the latter:

we do not see extensive evidence of loan words providing input for suppletive paradigms. This is

a curious fact considering how frequent lexical borrowing has otherwise been in the Caucasus

(Chirikba 2008).

One way of viewing this is that it is a side-effect of the frequency effects that have

already been noted in cross-linguistic studies of suppletion. If a language borrows a new lexeme

from a neighboring language in contact, there is no guarantee that that lexeme will be a

frequent one early in the borrowing process, or even centuries later. But there is another

possible reason, and this is that for a borrowed word to enter into a suppletive paradigm with a

preexisting word, the language must generally already have a grammatical category to provide a

framework for that paradigm. Consequently, when we look at suppletive trends across the three

autochthonous families, we see that indeed the kinds of suppletion that exist in them do not

always seem to fall into the same categories: the kinds of tenses, for example, and the way tenses

are formed, vary significantly across the three families, and not surprisingly the extent to which

suppletion is found across them in that category varies as well. In some families, a category like

gender will be robust (e.g. Nakh-Daghestanian), allowing for suppletion, while in others it will

be weak (Abkhaz-Adyghean) or entirely absent (Kartvelian), leading to rarity or absence of

suppletion for it. An examination of Table X summarizes these trends, including English as a

control case.


Table X. Suppletive trends across Caucasian languages

Strong (√) / weak (w) / no (*)

suppletion for:

NAKH-

DAGHESTANIAN

KARTVELIAN

ABKHAZ-

ADYGHEAN

ENGLISH

verbal lexical contrast

tense √ √+ * √+

aspect √ √ * *

mood √ * * *

person * √ * √

number √ √ √ w

gender rare * * *

substantive nominals

case

number

√ √ * √ (pronouns)

√ √ ? √ (pronouns)

adnominals rare √ rare √

numerals √ √ marginal √

[‘+’ indicates extensive suppletion for a given category.]

§6. Whence suppletion?

Such a chart serves to highlight the morpholexical and morphosyntactic diversity of the

Caucasus as a linguistic area, rather than its oft-presumed unity. From the perspective of

suppletion, languages like Abkhaz actually have more in common with a language like English

(here used as a control) than neighboring families like Nakh-Daghestanian or Kartvelian. But

what it does not illustrate is the underlying mechanisms that we encountered above that

engender or obviate suppletion in the first place. These can be summarized as follows:

(n) a. Phonological sound-change leading to stem alternations. E.g. Khwarshi oblique stem

formation (n) or Tsova-Tush plural noun stems (n)

b. Competing morphosyntactic constructions. E.g. Georgian adnominals in comparative

constructions (n); Svan ordinal numerals (n);

c. Ossification of moribund morphological processes. E.g. Udi possessive pronouns with

ossified gender prefixes (n)

d. Paradigmatic gaps becoming filled by other stems. E.g. Georgian tense forms, Table 2.

e. Lexical borrowing. E.g. Svan ordinal numerals (n)

The picture we see from this study of suppletion across Caucasian languages is that it is in

fact a rather complicated morphological phenomenon with multiple sources. In some cases,

such as the formation of Khwarshi oblique stems, we saw that processes external to morphology

proper can trigger quite localized changes to the morphological system in place. In other cases,

such as the adoption of a new construction (or the loss of an old) for making comparisons, a

language may gain (or lose) the possibility of new suppletive forms simply because the entire


subsystem works differently now. But perhaps the most interesting fact of this study is how

suppletion is revealed to be the result of commonplace morphological processes working in the

context of entire systems of morphology. Suppletion is, in other words, not a side-show, but a

very revealing way to understand the core of natural language morphological systems.

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Contact:

Dr. Thomas R. Wier Free University of Tbilisi

University Campus of Dighomi

Davit Aghmashenebeli Alley, 13km

Tbilisi 0131, Georgia

Email: trwier AT gmail DOT com

t.wier AT freeuni DOT edu DOT ge

Suppletion in the Languages of the Caucasus

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