The Linguistic Review | 2019
Agreeing in number: Verbal plural suppletion and reduplication
Abstract
Abstract Verbal suppletion for participant number has recently attracted theoretical attention (Bobaljik & Harley 2017; Toosarvandani 2016). I show that cross-linguistically, participant number is marked by suppletion and reduplication and is part of a broader phenomenon, verbal number. I argue that reduplication provides evidence that participant number suppletion is not directly triggered by the argument, and I propose a unified account of participant number where there is a verb-internal number node that reflects number and mediates an agreement relation between the argument and the root. The number node, which marks plural arguments and events, may be valued by the closest c-commanding DP, and will be realized as reduplication or will trigger root suppletion. This is supported cross-linguistically by languages which mark both participant and event number by reduplication and suppletion. I propose that this head allows a stricter locality condition on suppletion where the trigger is always a head in the morphological word (complex X⁰). My analysis bears on current issues of locality and suppletive domains since I argue that the topmost complex X⁰ node forms a morphological domain which contains smaller domains that are privileged in the syntax but restrictive in the morphophonology.