Introduction

One of my very first linguistic delights came in a Latin class at school, when I discovered the principal parts of ferre. That a word could conjugate as: fero ∼ ferre ∼ tuli ∼ latum was an unexpected pleasure, even when years later I found out that tuli and latum were merely forms of the same verb. I am not too sure that every linguist has that same feeling. I have been inspecting a variety of historical linguistics handbooks to see what they have to say about suppletion. Indeed, even Microsoft Word was no help, since it suggested that what I should have written was either supple ion or simpleton.

More seriously, Lehmann (1992), for example, does not even index the term. And in this he is not alone, for there are others in the same position, including Lass (1997) and Campbell (1998). And others mention the term merely in passing: thus Trask (1996) does little more than refer to the term, whilst others use the term in a context which is different from that with which I am concerned here, for example Anderson (1992). Perhaps not surprisingly, the morphologist who comes closest to today's issues is Matthews (1991: 139–40).

One question to be asked, quite obviously, is why, even amongst morphologists, the issue of suppletion has been relatively ignored. The answer to this, I believe, is two-fold. Firstly suppletion is ignored because, wherever it occurs, it is felt to be a one-off, a fun idiosyncrasy and no more.