Suppletion

In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognates. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular". For example, go:went is a suppletive paradigm, because go and went are not etymologically related, whereas mouse:mice is irregular but not suppletive, since the two words come from the same Old English ancestor.

The term "suppletion" implies that a gap in the paradigm was filled by a form "supplied" by a different paradigm. Instances of suppletion are overwhelmingly restricted to the most commonly used lexical items in a language.

Irregularity and suppletion

An irregular paradigm is one in which the derived forms of a word cannot be deduced by simple rules from the base form. For example, someone who knows only a little English can deduce that the plural of girl is girls but cannot deduce that the plural of man is men. Language learners are often most aware of irregular verbs, but any part of speech with inflections can be irregular.

For most synchronic purposes—first-language acquisition studies, psycholinguistics, language-teaching theory—it suffices to note that these forms are irregular. However, historical linguistics seeks to explain how they came to be so and distinguishes different kinds of irregularity according to their origins.

Most irregular paradigms (like man:men) can be explained by phonological developments that affected one form of a word but not another (in this case, Germanic umlaut). In such cases, the historical antecedents of the current forms once constituted a regular paradigm.

Historical linguistics uses the term "suppletion"

to distinguish irregularities like person:people or cow:cattle that cannot be so explained because the parts of the paradigm have not evolved out of a single form.

Hermann Osthoff coined the term "suppletion" in German in an 1899 study of the phenomenon in Indo-European languages.

Suppletion exists in many languages around the world. These languages are from various language families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Semitic, Romance, etc.

For example, in Georgian, the paradigm for the verb "to come" is composed of four different roots (, , , and ; , , , ).

Similarly, in Modern Standard Arabic, the verb ' ('come') usually uses the form ' for its imperative, and the plural of ' ('woman') is '.

Some of the more archaic Indo-European languages are particularly known for suppletion. Ancient Greek, for example, has some twenty verbs with suppletive paradigms, many with three separate roots.

Example words

To go

In English, the past tense of the verb go is went, which comes from the past tense of the verb wend, archaic in this sense. (The modern past tense of wend is wended.) See Go (verb).

The Romance languages have a variety of suppletive forms in conjugating the verb "to go", as these first-person singular forms illustrate (second-person singular forms in imperative):

{| class="wikitable"

! Language

! colspan="2" | Imperative

! colspan="2" | Present

! colspan="2" | Subjunctive

! colspan="2" | Future

! colspan="2" | Preterite

! colspan="2" | Infinitive

! French

| style="background:PaleGreen;" | ,

| style="background:PaleGreen;" |

| 1

| style="background: PaleTurquoise;" |

| 4

| style="background: lightyellow;" |

| 2

| style="background: PaleTurquoise;" |

| 4

| style="background: PaleTurquoise;" |

| 4

! Romansh (Sursilvan)

| style="background:PaleGreen;" |

| style="background: pink;" |

| 6

| style="background: pink;" |

| 6

| colspan=2 style="text-align:center;" | —

| style="background: lightyellow;" |

| 2

! Sardinian (Logudorese)

| style="background:PaleGreen;" |

| style="background: lightblue;" |

| 3

| style="background: lightblue;" | ,

| 3

| colspan=2 style="text-align:center;" | —

| style="background: lightblue;" |

| 3

! Italian

| style="background:PaleGreen;" | , ,

| style="background:PaleGreen;" | ,

| 1

| style="background:PaleGreen;" |

| 1

| style="background: lightblue;" |

| 3

| style="background: lightblue;" |

| 3

| style="background: lightblue;" |

| 3

! Occitan (Languedocien)

| style="background:PaleGreen;" |

| 1

|style="background: lightblue;" |

| 3

| style="background: lightblue;" |

| 3

| style="background: lightblue;" |

| 3

| style="background: lightblue;" |

| 3

! Catalan

| style="background:PaleGreen;" |

| 1

| style="background:PaleGreen;" |

| 1

| style="background: lightblue;" |

| 3

| style="background: lightblue;" |

| 3

| style="background: lightblue;" |

| 3

! rowspan=2 | Spanish

| style="background:PaleGreen;" | tú

| rowspan=2 style="background:PaleGreen;" |

| rowspan=2 | 1

| rowspan=2 style="background:PaleGreen;" |

| rowspan=2 | 1

| rowspan=2 style="background: lightyellow;" |

| rowspan=2 | 2

| rowspan=2 style="background: wheat;" |

| rowspan=2 | 5

| rowspan=2 style="background: lightyellow;" |

| rowspan=2 | 2

| style="background: lightblue;" | vos

! rowspan=2 | Portuguese

| style="background:PaleGreen;" | tu

| 1

| rowspan=2 style="background:PaleGreen;" |

| rowspan=2 | 1

| rowspan=2 style="background:PaleGreen;" |

| rowspan=2 | 1

| rowspan=2 style="background: lightyellow;" |

| rowspan=2 | 2

| rowspan=2 style="background: wheat;" |

| rowspan=2 | 5

| rowspan=2 style="background: lightyellow;" |

| rowspan=2 | 2

| style="background: lightyellow;" | vós

The sources of these forms, numbered in the table, are six different Latin verbs:

‘to go, proceed’,
‘to go’
‘to go around’, also the source for Spanish and Portuguese ‘to walk’
‘to walk’, or perhaps another Latin root, a Celtic root, or a Germanic root or
suppletive perfective of ‘to be’.
‘to go along’.

Many of the Romance languages use forms from different verbs in the present tense; for example, French has ‘I go’ from , but ‘we go’ from . Galician-Portuguese has a similar example: from ‘to go’ and from ‘we go’; the former is somewhat disused in modern Portuguese but very alive in modern Galician. Even , from second-person plural of , is the only form for ‘you (plural) go’ both in Galician and Portuguese (Spanish , from ).

Sometimes, the conjugations differ between dialects. For instance, the Limba Sarda Comuna standard of Sardinian supported a fully regular conjugation of , but other dialects like Logudorese do not (see also Sardinian conjugation). In Romansh, Rumantsch Grischun substitutes present and subjunctive forms of ir with vom and giaja (both are from Latin vādere and īre, respectively) in the place of mon and mondi in Sursilvan.

Similarly, the Welsh verb ‘to go’ has a variety of suppletive forms such as ‘I shall go’ and ‘we went’. Irish ‘to go’ also has suppletive forms: ‘going’ and ‘will go’.

In Estonian, the inflected forms of the verb ‘to go’ were originally those of a verb cognate with the Finnish ‘to leave’, except for the passive and infinitive.

Good and bad

In Germanic, Romance (except Romanian), Celtic, Slavic (except Bulgarian and Macedonian), and Indo-Iranian languages, the comparative and superlative of the adjective "good" is suppletive; in many of these languages the adjective "bad" is also suppletive.

{| class="wikitable"

|+ good, better, best

! Language !! Adjective !! Etymology !! Comparative !! Superlative !! Etymology

! colspan="6" | Germanic languages

! English

|good

| rowspan="9" |Proto-Germanic:

cognate to

|better

|best

| rowspan="9" |Proto-Germanic:

| Old Russian , neut.

Old Church Slavonic: "more suitable, appropriate" related to OE ("to defile") < Proto-Germanic ("constrain, cause to stay") In OE was more common, compare Proto-Germanic , Gothic (bad), German (evil / bad), English evil

| worse

| worst

| rowspan="8" |From Proto-Germanic *wirsizô, *wirsistaz.

! Old Norse

| rowspan="7" |From Proto-Germanic *wanh-.

! Icelandic

! Faroese

! Norwegian Bokmål

| ,

!Norwegian Nynorsk

|vond

|verre

|verst(e)

! Swedish

! Danish

! colspan="6" | Romance languages

! French

| rowspan="5" |

| colspan="2" |

| rowspan="5" | , cognate to Sanskrit "he falls"

! Portuguese

|colspan="2" |

! Spanish

|colspan="2" |

! Catalan

|colspan="2" |

! Italian

|colspan="2" |

! colspan="6" | Celtic languages

! Scottish Gaelic

| rowspan="3" | Proto-Celtic ("bad") < (possibly) PIE ("to deceive")

| colspan="2" |

| rowspan="2" | Proto-Celtic < PIE ("to change")

! Irish

|colspan="2" |

! Welsh

| Proto-Celtic ("worst")

! colspan="6" | Slavic languages

! Polish

| rowspan="5" | Proto-Slavic '

| rowspan="5"| compare Polish (to disgust, scandalise)

! Czech

! Slovak

! Ukrainian

| archaic 

! Serbo-Croatian

! Russian

| ()

| probably Proto-Slavic '

Japanese

In modern Japanese, the copulae だ, である and です take な to create "attributive forms" of adjectival nouns (hence the English moniker, "na-adjectives"):

{| class="wikitable"

! Irrealis 未然形

! Adverbial 連用形

! Conclusive 終止形

! Attributive 連体形

! Hypothetical 仮定形

! Imperative 命令形

| だろ -daro

| だっ -daQ で -de に -ni

| だ -da

| な -na

| なら -nara

The "conclusive" and "attributive" forms, だ and な, were constructed similarly, from a combination of a particle and an inflection form of the old verb あり (ari, "to exist").

で + あり ("conclusive") → であり → であ → だ
に + ある ("attributive") → なる → なん → な

(Note: で itself was also a contraction of earlier にて.)

In modern Japanese, である ("conclusive") simply retains the older appearance of だ, while です is a different verb that can be used as a suppleted form of だ. Multiple hypotheses have been proposed for the etymology of です, one of which is a contraction of であります:

で + あり ("adverbial") + ます → であります → です

The basic construction of the negative form of a Japanese verb is the "irrealis" form followed by ない, which would result in such hypothetical constructions as *だらない and *であらない. However, these constructions are not used in modern Japanese, and the construction ではない is used instead. This is because *あらない, the hypothetically regular negative form of ある, is not used either, and is simply replaced with ない.

あら ("irrealis") + ない → ない
であら ("irrealis") + ない → ではない
だら ("irrealis") + ない → ではない → じゃない

While the auxiliary ない causes suppletion, other auxiliaries such as ん and ありません do not necessarily.

あら ("irrealis") + ん → あらん
あり ("adverbial") + ませ + ん → ありません
であり ("adverbial") + ませ + ん → でありません

For です, its historical "irrealis" form, でせ has not been attested to create a negative form (only でせう → でしょう has been attested, and there were and are no *でせん and *でせない). Thus, it has to borrow でありません as its negative form instead. Slovene ( > ), and Macedonian ( () > ()).

Generalizations

Strictly speaking, suppletion occurs when different inflections of a lexeme (i.e., with the same lexical category) have etymologically unrelated stems. The term is also used in looser senses, albeit less formally.

Semantic relations

The term "suppletion" is also used in the looser sense when there is a semantic link between words but not an etymological one; unlike the strict inflectional sense, these may be in different lexical categories, such as noun/verb.

English noun/adjective pairs such as father/paternal or cow/bovine are also referred to as collateral adjectives. In this sense of the term, father/fatherly is non-suppletive. Fatherly is derived from father, while father/paternal is suppletive. Likewise cow/cowish is non-suppletive, while cow/bovine is suppletive.

In these cases, father/pater- and cow/bov- are cognate via Proto-Indo-European, but 'paternal' and 'bovine' are borrowings into English (via Old French and Latin). The pairs are distantly etymologically related, but the words are not from a single Modern English stem.

Weak suppletion

The term "weak suppletion" is sometimes used in contemporary synchronic morphology in reference to sets of stems whose alternations cannot be accounted for by synchronically productive phonological rules. For example, the two forms child/children are etymologically from the same source, but the alternation does not reflect any regular morphological process in modern English: this makes the pair appear to be suppletive, even though the forms go back to the same root.

In that understanding, English has abundant examples of weak suppletion in its verbal inflection: e.g. bring/brought, take/took, see/saw, etc. Even though the forms are etymologically related in each pair, no productive morphological rule can derive one form from the other in synchrony. Alternations just have to be learned by speakers — in much the same way as truly suppletive pairs such as go/went.

Such cases, which were traditionally simply labelled "irregular", are sometimes described with the term "weak suppletion", so as to restrict the term "suppletion" to etymologically unrelated stems.

Irregularity and suppletion

Example words

To go

Good and bad

Japanese

Generalizations

Semantic relations

Weak suppletion

See also

References