[8] The idea of suprasegmental morphemes was introduced in Eugene Nida's morphology textbook, where he suggested the term, suprafix, to account for these kinds of morphemes; the term was adopted by George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith Jr. in their paper on the structure of English.
[13] That can fall under a broader category of additive morphology (e.g. processes of prefixation, suffixation, infixation).
[4] This is exemplified by a language in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ngbaka: wà, wā, wǎ and wá all mean 'clean'.
[1] An example can be found in another language from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mongbandi: ngbò and ngbó both mean 'swam'.
The suprafix can also be defined as an underlying suprasegmental pattern that indicates a property of a particular type of phrase in a language but especially for English.
[1] In Tibetan, replacive suprafixes in stress are used to disambiguate many noun and verb homographs, in a way similar to English (e.g. 'import (n) vs. im'port (v), as described above).
This pattern of replacive suprafixes with stress, where homograph verbs and nouns are stressed on their first and second syllables, respectively, can be generalized in Tibetan, since a large number of verbs and nouns are two-syllable words consisting of a single-syllable free morpheme (and semantic root) followed by either of the two bound morphemes and nominalizing particles པ (Wylie: pa, IPA: [pa]) or བ (Wylie: ba, IPA: [wa]) (which of the two particles follows is determined by euphony rules, based on the final letter of the preceding syllable).
[15] Additionally, in the literary register of Tibetan (and to some extent in the colloquial register as well, although herein less often realized), a separate system of replacive suprafixes in aspiration allows speakers to disambiguate otherwise identically-pronounced volitional and non-volitional forms (this extends in some cases to transitivity, although this is a separate, yet often interrelated concept in Tibetan, usually conceived of as a causative/resultative relationship) of the same verb.
[18] In the Waurá language of Brazil, there is a nasalization suprafix that arises when the word is placed in a possessive construction: nu-mapã́, 'my honey' and mápa, 'honey'.
However, when the four different additive suprafixes are affixed, a change in tense/aspect is realised: kpòlò, kpōlō, kpòló and kpóló.