ABA patterns and the generative power of Nanosyntax

Abstract This chapter shows that the existing Nanosyntactic machinery is able to generate ABA patterns where all three paradigm cells are filled by portmanteau forms using pointers and complex left branches. Then, novel data of the interaction between Russian suppletive adjectives and analytic degree morphology are presented and argued to exemplify exactly the ABA pattern predicted to lie within the reach of the generative power of Nanosyntax, suggesting that the fact that the system generates such an ABA pattern should be taken as a positive consequence. The paper thus supports Nanosyntactic approach to portmanteau formation and suppletion over theories that only rely on insertion into terminal nodes and structural locality to account for *ABA (such as Distributed Morphology).