Locality conditions on suppletive verbs in Hiaki

We support the claim (Embick 2010, Bobaljik 2012) that suppletion is triggered locally by showing that number suppletion in Hiaki invariably occurs within the same phase and XP containing the suppletion target (the verbal Root) and its trigger (its complement). Evidence from their incompatibility with high applicatives suggests that Hiaki intransitive suppletive verbs are unaccusative. The Hiaki facts also dispute Embick & Halle’s (2005) proposal that only f-nodes compete for insertion. Rather, Hiaki suppletive verbs exhibit full semantic content typical of Roots, suggesting that Vocabulary Items also compete for insertion into Root nodes. Additionally, because no XP can intervene between the trigger and its target according to Bobaljik’s locality condition, the structural architecture we propose challenges the claim (Borer 2003, De Belder 2011) that Roots are extremely underspecified syntactic objects that do not take complements, because a maximal projection would then intervene between the suppletion target and its trigger.