The Study of Suppletion in Persian Inflected Nouns and Verbs

Suppletion is a morphological process which can be found in inflectional system and word formation processes of languages. It refers to the inflected forms of words which do not share a common etymology with the base in other forms of the same word. Suppletion describes the instances where a lexical meaning and a grammatical meaning are represented by a single indivisible form. For example, in English many of the past tense forms of the verbs have suppletive stems, e.g., grow and grew. In fact, their root is different from the base or there is a little similarity to the root. This article aimed at studying the suppletion process in inflected form of nouns and verbs in Persian. Moreover, it dealt with the structure of plural nouns and inflected form of verbs and identified partial and complete suppletion within those structures. The findings showed that suppletion process works in the structure of Persian nouns and verbs. Partial suppletion occurs in some Persian nouns which are made plural by adding "-ān" and "-āt" as well as in broken (mokassar) plurals. It also occurs in inflected forms of the verbs, while total suppletion can be found only in two verb forms. Suppletive forms are considered to be inflected allomorphs of a word. This may have historical and phonological explanations.

Keywords:

Partial suppletion , Total suppletion , Morphological structure , stem