Verbal suppletion: an analysis of Italian, French, and Spanish to go

An attempt is made to show that person-number suppletive replacements follow language-specific alternation patterns, or templates, which mark the positions of stem alternations often shared by several verbs. These paradigmatic frameworks are stored in the lexicon with their verb forms & guide verbal restructuring processes by serving as the base configuration for suppletive replacements. As Italian andare, French aller, & Spanish ir 'to go' have patterns of paradigmatic alternations that are shared by other verbs, they cannot be considered here as isolated idiosyncrasies in their verbal systems. The relative strength of a pattern is directly related to the number of verbs associated with it: the most productive template is represented by completely rule-driven patterns, the template of lowest productivity encompasses only one verb, & all intermediate stages of productivity are represented by templates shared by various numbers of verbs. As verbs acquire new alternations, the shift is consistently to more productive templates. 49 References. Adapted from the source document