Inflectional suppletion in Turkic languages

Eyüp Bacanlı

doi:10.1515/flih.2011.002

Article

Inflectional suppletion in Turkic languages

Eyüp Bacanlı

Published/Copyright: October 20, 2011

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From the journal Folia Linguistica Historica Volume 45 Issue Historica-vol-32

As a type of irregularity and anomaly, suppletion has been widely investigated in Indo-European languages. It is generally thought that Turkic languages, as they are very agglutinating, do not tolerate such irregularities. Though this is true to a certain extent, suppletion may be observed in any natural language as a universal linguistic phenomenon. Turkic languages contain a considerable number of radical and affixal suppletive pairs. In this article I deal with those suppletive pairs in historical and contemporary Turkic languages and comment on their rise and degradation through phonological and semantic shifts, language contact or analogy. I will revisit and reorganize certain pairs which have been falsely classified as suppletive. Since it is important to distinguish suppletive pairs from separate lexical and grammatical morphemes, I will also clarify some theoretical points regarding apophony, uniqueness, the productiveness of single paradigms, lexicalization, synonymy and antonymy.

Keywords:: suppletion; Turkic languages; inflection; heteronymy; apophony

Published Online: 2011-10-20

Published in Print: 2011-October

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/flih.2011.002

Keywords for this article

suppletion; Turkic languages; inflection; heteronymy; apophony