Folia Linguistica Historica 32 (2011), 1–42. doi 10.1515/flih.2011.002 issn 0165–4004, e-issn 1614–7308 © Mouton de Gruyter – Societas Linguistica Europaea Infectional suppletion in Turkic languages 1 Eyüp Bacanlı Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölüm Baskani TOBB Ekonomi ve Teknoloji Üniversitesi, Ankara As a type of irregularity and anomaly, suppletion has been widely investigated in Indo-European languages. It is generally thought that Turkic languages, as they are very agglutinating, do not tolerate such irregularities. Tough this is true to a certain extent, suppletion may be observed in any natural language as a universal linguistic phenomenon. Turkic languages contain a considerable number of radical and afxal suppletive pairs. In this article I deal with those suppletive pairs in historical and contemporary Turkic languages and comment on their rise and degradation through phonological and semantic shifs, language contact or analogy. I will revisit and reorganize certain pairs which have been falsely classifed as suppletive. Since it is important to distinguish suppletive pairs from separate lexical and grammatical morphemes, I will also clarify some theoretical points regarding apophony, uniqueness, the productiveness of single paradigms, lexicalization, synonymy and antonymy. Keywords: suppletion, Turkic languages, infection, heteronymy, apophony 1 My warmest thanks go to Ljuba Veselinova, Greville Corbett and Dmitrij M. Nasilov for their helpful advice regarding the theoretical aspects of suppletion. I am grateful to Oğuzhan Durmuş, Fanuza Nurieva, Natal’ja Popova and Sultan Tulu for sharing their knowledge on pairs in Turkic languages. I am also grateful to Jeannette Okur for her editing, Na’ama Pat-El for her checking the manuscript of this article, to anonymous FoLH reviewers and to the editor of FoLH, Prof. Nikolaus Ritt, for their diligent, constructive comments and suggestions. Brought to you by | Columbia University Library The Burke Library New York Authenticated | 172.16.1.226 Download Date | 7/31/12 8:13 PM