Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The use of an unrelated form to complete a paradigm, as the past tense went of the verb go, goes, going, gone.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The
supplying of something lacking. - noun grammar The use of an unrelated word or phrase to supply inflected forms otherwise lacking, e.g. using “to be able” as the
infinitive of “can ”, or “better” as thecomparative of “good ”. - noun grammar More loosely, use of unrelated (or distantly related) words for semantically related words which may not share the same
lexical category , such as father/paternal or cow/bovine.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[From Latin supplētus, past participle of supplēre, to supply; see supply.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Latin supplere ("to supply"), perfect stem supplet-, + -ion.
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Examples
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Other, more extreme cases of allomorphy are called suppletion, where two forms related by a morphological rule cannot be explained as being related on a phonological basis: for example, the past of go is went, which is a suppletive form.
Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium - Recent changes [en] 2008
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Compared to other solutions regarding the origins of PIE's 1ps nominative pronoun and suppletion, this is the most explanatory and leaves nothing to mystery.
Back to business: emphatic particles and verbal extensions 2008
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