How to derive allomorphy: a case study from Czech
Markéta Zíková, Michaela Faltýnková · The Linguistic Review · 2021
Abstract The paper discusses a three-way allomorphic pattern of neuter-gender stems in Czech. We argue that there are two surface alternations involved in the three-stem pattern, i.e.a-eandt-zero, and that the two alternations are driven by two distinct mechanisms, i.e. suppletion and regular phonological computation respectively. We postulate two suppletive stem-building suffixes that are lexically connected via the Nanosyntactic tool of pointers. We argue that the defaulta-initial suffix spells out the neuter gender and its suppletivee-initial variant is a portmanteau morpheme of the (neuter) gender and (singular) number. We further propose that the suppletive suffix is stored with a floating consonant that does not surface word-finally due to regular phonological computation.