Late Insertion and Root Suppletion

This article proposes a Nanosyntactic Late­Insertion approach to root suppletion. We show that this theory allows us to account for root suppletion within a strictly modular theory of grammar, which makes no syntactic distinction between different roots. As a starting point, we first focus on the architectural difficulties that arise for a modular theory of roots in the Distributed Morphology approach. We then show how Nanosyntax circumvents these problems, and address two potential empirical issues for the Nanosyntactic treatment (multiple exponence and locality), showing that they in fact provide support for the approach proposed.