The Surrey Suppletion database

Abstract

Suppletion is a morphological phenomenon where different inflectional forms are not related phonologically. Mel'čuk defines it in the following way:

"For the signs X and Y to be suppletive their semantic correlation should be maximally regular, while their formal correlation is maximally irregular." (Mel'čuk 1994: 358)

Russian čelovek (человек) 'person', which has the plural ljudi (люди), is a typical instance of suppletion. Suppletion is found in many inflecting languages, and "increasingly ... is coming to be seen as a clue to the way in which the inflected forms of a word are related to each other paradigmatically ... and are stored in the memory" (Carstairs-McCarthy 1994: 4410). We have examined a range of genetically diverse languages, created a database, and used it to construct a typologically informed theory of suppletion.