Abstract
The emergence & development over time of alternating stem suppletion among Russian nouns is investigated in a corpus of texts & etymological dictionaries, with particular attention to the inflectional paradigms of two nouns, god 'year' & chelovek 'person'. Stem suppletion is viewed as an intermediate diachronic stage in which one stem is encroaching on the paradigm of another, leading to the full replacement of the latter by the former. Suppletion is found to be conditioned by four principal factors: (1) a paradigmatic leveling tendency, (2) an anomalously high absolute frequency of the lexeme, (3) an anomalously high relative frequency of the paradigmatic slot where suppletion occurs, & (4) the historical semantic reinforcement of one of the suppletive forms in association with particular syntactic constructions. 16 Tables, 16 References. J. Hitchcock