However, historical linguistics seeks to explain how they came to be so and distinguishes different kinds of irregularity according to their origins. Language learners are often most aware of irregular verbs, but any part of speech with inflections can be irregular.įor most synchronic purposes-first-language acquisition studies, psycholinguistics, language-teaching theory-it suffices to note that these forms are irregular. 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. Instances of suppletion are overwhelmingly restricted to the most commonly used lexical items in a language.Īn irregular paradigm is one in which the derived forms of a word cannot be deduced by simple rules from the base form. The term 'suppletion' implies that a gap in the paradigm was filled by a form 'supplied' by a different paradigm. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as 'irregular' or even 'highly irregular'.
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 cognate. A word having inflected forms from multiple unrelated stems
