The dominant-recessive hypothesis does not account for overlapping suppletion

The dominant-recessive hypothesis proposes that suppletive patterns derive largely from an asymmetrical relationship between contributing lexemes (Börjars & Vincent 2011). The dominant lexeme is more semantically general and receives forms from the recessive lexeme, which is semantically less general. Exemplifying their hypothesis with verbs meaning ‘go’ and special emphasis on adjectives in Scandinavian, Börjars & Vincent highlight suppletion caused by incursion. This chapter argues that the dominant-recessive hypothesis oversimplifies the semantic relationships between roots and does not address overlapping suppletion or cases with more than two contributing lexemes. The claim is that detailed lexical semantic analysis — including considerations of synonymy, semantic distance, and hyponymy/hypernymy relations — and examination of paradigmatic relationships better account for the data.