Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 September 2017
This article reviews some of the main theoretical claims made in Jonathan David Bobaljik’s 2012 book, which deals with root suppletion in adjectival degree expressions. My first goal is to make the reader familiar with a coherent fragment of the overall system and the data that motivate it. The second goal is to discuss one specific part of the account, namely that words, understood as complex heads, are special for suppletion in the sense that suppletion is impossible beyond this domain. I argue that it is possible to abandon this assumption with no loss of descriptive coverage, and argue that in doing so, we can formulate a unified theory which covers both suppletion and morpheme order.
I am grateful to three anonymous JL referees for their comments. They helped me in removing a lot of errors, typos and imprecisions of the original version. The research reported on in this paper was supported by funding from GAČR (The Czech Science Foundation), project GA17-10144S, awarded to Pavel Caha. Parts of the research were also supported by GA14-04215S, awarded to Markéta Ziková. The article appears with support received from the Faculty of Arts at Masarykova Univerzita (ROZV/20/FF/CAH/2015).