Chapter published in:
Reorganising Grammatical Variation: Diachronic studies in the retention, redistribution and refunctionalisation of linguistic variants
Edited by Antje Dammel, Matthias Eitelmann and Mirjam Schmuck
[Studies in Language Companion Series 203] 2018
► pp. 119–148

Genesis and diachronic persistence of overabundance

Data from Romance languages

| University of Oxford
This article investigates the genesis and diachronic persistence of ‘overabundance’ (Thornton 2011) or variation at the level of individual cells in a lexeme’s paradigm (e.g. Italian pst.ptcp forms sepolto/seppellito ‘buried’). Two main genetic paths are identified: emergence (i) via form competition (e.g. Italian ella/essa ‘she’) and (ii) via rule competition (e.g. Ladin talaranes/talarane/talaràs ‘spiders’). Building on previous work (Cappellaro 2013, 2017), the present study proposes that persistence correlates positively with low frequency and later acquisition, but also addresses the question whether there is a link between genetic type (form/rule competition) and persistence. In the case of Italian sepolto/seppellito < Latin sepultus/sepelitus, persistence over millennia is metachronic – a function of analogical pressures inherent in the system, which can, in principle, operate at any given time.
Keywords: overabundance, inflectional variation, lexeme, metachronic, low frequency
Published online: 24 October 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.203.05cap
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Cited by other publications

Goldstein, D. M.
2020.  Homeric ‐ phi(n) is an oblique case marker1 . Transactions of the Philological Society 118:3 ► pp. 343 ff. Crossref logo
Thornton, Anna M.
2019.  In Competition in Inflection and Word-Formation [Studies in Morphology, 5], ► pp. 223 ff. Crossref logo

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