The Sense That Suppletion Makes: Towards a Semantic Typology on Diachronic Principles

This paper examines the semantic factors involved in three crucial questions about suppletion in verbs: what verbs develop suppletion, what verbs contribute to suppletive paradigms, and how roots are distributed in suppletive paradigms. My analysis shows that the development of suppletion is more orderly than commonly believed. Specifically, semantic distance and other semantic factors facilitate explanations of suppletive patterns that earlier studies focusing on typological and morphological considerations could not account for. I apply semantic maps to well‐known cases of suppletion in addition to underreported and previously unreported patterns, including Hungarian data displaying a previously unknown type of suppletion—non‐aligned overlapping suppletion—where forms shared by separate lexemes belong to distinct parts of their paradigms. I contextualize semantic factors in the relationships between synchronic types and diachronic sources. My analysis refines our understanding of suppletion types and shows the logic behind suppletive distributions.