[Lingtyp] Gender suppletion beyond nouns

[Adamson, Luke James]

Dear colleagues,

I'm looking for putative cases of "strong" gender suppletion beyond the highly controversial noun examples, though they appear to be few and far between for agreement targets (which has been noticed before; see e.g. Mel'čuk 1994:390). There are of course questions about terminology, but to be somewhat clearer: by i) "strong suppletion", I mean that the forms in question do not appear to be phonologically related (so go~went would count as strong suppletion but cases of German umlaut are not); and ii) by "gender", I mean nominal classification that has a corresponding effect on formal alternations in other categories like demonstratives, adjectives, verbs, or other agreement targets (Corbett 1991, Kramer 2015, etc.).

The discussions in the literature that I have found for adjectives/verbs/numerals (which are among the categories I'm interested in) are for the following languages: Bagwalal (Hippisley et al. 2004), Ancient(+Modern) Greek (Mel'čuk 1994), Tocharian (Kim 2019), Yelmek (Gray and Gregor 2019), and Coastal Marind (Olsson 2017), though there's some joint conditioning by a combination of gender and number for a subset of these.

Does anyone know of other cases?

Thank you,
Luke Adamson
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Linguistics, Harvard University


Corbett, Greville. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gray,  James,  and  Tina  Gregor.  2019.   Gender/number  syncretism  in  Yelmek  verbal  suppletion.   In Proceedings of GLOW in Asia XII and SICOGGXXI.
Hippisley,  Andrew,  Marina  Chumakina,  Greville  Corbett,  and  Dunstan  Brown.  2004.   Suppletion:  frequency, categories and distribution of stems. Studies in Language 28(2): 387–418.
Kim, Ronald. 2019. Adjectival suppletion in Tocharian. In Diachronic perspectives on suppletion, ed. Ronald Kim,179–200. Hamburg: Baar.
Kramer, Ruth. 2015. The morphosyntax of gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mel’čuk, Igor. 1994.   Suppletion:  toward a logical analysis of the concept. Studies in Language 18(2): 339–410.
Olsson,  Bruno. 2017.   The Coastal Marind language. Doctoral Dissertation, Nanyang Technological University, Jurong West, Singapore.
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