Abstract
Kin terms in some languages have suppletive roots according to the person of the possessor, as in Kaluli
‘my daughter’,
‘your daughter’ versus
‘her/his daughter’. Suppletion is generally seen as a language-specific morphological peculiarity, but in this context there are a number of lexical and morphological similarities across languages, suggesting the motivation may also lie in the nature of kin terms themselves. We offer a typological assessment of suppletive kin terms through a case study of the languages of New Guinea, where the phenomenon appears to be particularly common.