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Does the verb for ‘see’ have suppletive verb forms?
Summary
This question concerns strong suppletion in verb(s) of seeing/watching/looking. Suppletion is a process where a lexeme is changed in such a way that the new form does not resemble the previous when it appears in a different position in the paradigm. ‘Weak’ suppletion is not included. An example of this is English went and go. In this case, the verb is suppletive for tense.
Please note that we are not interested in words that are translated as ‘look for’, ‘seek’ etc. This feature is concerned with the transitive verb of the act of seeing, not with metaphorical extensions such as 'seek up’.
Procedure
- Look up the section on verbs of seeing.
- If none exist, search for the words ‘see’, ‘look’ and ‘watch’.
- If the verb paradigm for ‘see’ is not described, code as ?.
- If the verb ‘see’ is described as being non-variant in any way, code as 0.
- If the verb ‘see’ is suppletive anywhere, code as 1.
Examples
Polish (ISO 639-3: pol, Glottolog: poli1260)
In Polish, there is suppletion for the verb for ‘to see’ in regards to aspect (Swan 2002: 289). In the imperfective, the stem widzieç is used. In the perfective, zobaczyć is used. These stems are different enough to count as suppletion. Polish would be coded 1 for this feature. The table below show the two stems in infinitive form.
| TAM value | Verb |
|---|---|
| Imperfective | widzieć ‘to see/to be seeing’ |
| Perfective | zobaczyć ‘to catch sight of’ |
Further reading
Dressler, Wolfgang. 1985. Suppletion in word-formation. In Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Historical morphology, 97–112. The Hague: Mouton.
Veselinova, Ljuba N. 2006. Suppletion in verb paradigms: Bits and pieces of the puzzle. (Typological Studies in Language. Vol. 67.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Veselinova, Ljuba N. 2013. Suppletion according to tense and aspect. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds), The world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
References
Swan, Oscar E. 2002. A grammar of contemporary Polish. Bloomington: Slavica.
Related Features
- GB099 Is there verb suppletion for participant person?
- GB109 Is there verb suppletion for participant number?
- GB110 Is there verb suppletion for tense or aspect?
- GB300 Does the verb for ‘give’ have suppletive verb forms?
- GB403 Does the verb for ‘come’ have suppletive verb forms?
Patron
Hedvig Skirgård