A New Look at Suppletion in Polish
A New Look at Suppletion in Polish

Summary/Abstract: The original stimulus for this work came from a virtual visit on the web page http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk, featuring the Surrey Suppletion Database (cf. HIPPISLEY et al. 2004; CORBETT et al. 2005). Browsing through the data and resources available there, I realized that this rich typological survey may provoke some interesting questions on the status of suppletion in Polish. Of course, suppletion is a pretty marginal phenomenon in Polish and its classical examples have been cited in standard grammar-books as well as some shorter contributions (see the references below). But, given the vast comparative evidence available today, the concept is worth exploring again. Besides, as pointed out in MARKEY (1985: 53), suppletion, even today, “remains poorly understood”. The basic aim of this paper is quite modest: to bring together the canonical examples of suppletion in Polish, give their characteristics and, on this basis, to shed some new light on a few theoretical problems and implications like the scope and definition of the concept itself, the graded nature of suppletion in the context of other kinds of formal irregularity, frequency factors in Polish suppletion, derivations from suppletive forms as well as implications for lexical representation.

• Details
• Contents