Romance Root Suppletion and Cumulative Exponence: Fusion, Pruning, Spanning

This paper discusses verbal stem allomorphy in Romance within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). We will present several technical instruments provided by the framework, applying them to an analysis of Romance verbal forms, with a particular focus on stem suppletion with the verb go. We conclude that the best solution to the problem of form–function discrepancies, as they appear in suppletion (but not only), is a spanning approach. This approach operates at Vocabulary Insertion only, without any need for the assumption of further, often critically discussed, morphological processes, such as fusion or pruning