Chapter 11: Suppletion and heteroclisis

Chapter 11 (‘Suppletion and heteroclisis’) focuses on the related phenomena of suppletion (the replacement of one stem by a morphophonologically unrelated stem in a lexeme’s inflectional paradigm) and heteroclisis (suppletion of stems belonging to distinct inflection classes).  Suppletion and heteroclisis reflect two dimensions of variation class-independent stems:  they may differ in form in a way that is not predicted by their inflection-class membership (and may, in that case, still be members of the same inflection class); instead or in addition, they may differ in their inflection-class membership (and may, in that case, still be alike in form).  Though suppletion is seen as a kind of irregularity, it does exhibit certain cross-linguistic regularities.