Variation with Synonymous Suffixes between Derivation and Compounding in Ancient Greek

The paper takes into account some cases of ‘suffix alternation’ in Ancient Greek, i.e., the coexistence of synonymous or nearly synonymous complex words that share the same formation pattern but have a different suffix. The analysis, carried out considering examples of both derivatives and compound words, shows that, in the case of derivatives, one of the main factors which give rise to this particular kind of variation is the desire to give the same morphological shape to words which were felt by the speakers to belong to the same ‘micro-paradigm’ (mostly semantically defined) within the lexicon. In the case of compounds, suffix alternation is linked either to an increase in the transparency of the compound’s morphosemantic structure or to the extension of the scope of a given suffix to other lexical categories.