Chapter published in:
Reorganising Grammatical Variation: Diachronic studies in the retention, redistribution and refunctionalisation of linguistic variantsEdited 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
Chiara Cappellaro | 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
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.203.05cap
References
References
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Forthcoming. Overabundance: A canonical typology. In Competition in Morphology, Franz Rainer, Francesco Gardani, Hans-Christian Luschütsky & Wolfgang U. Dressler eds Dordrecht Springer
Vincent, Nigel
Electronic source
ALD, Atlante Ladino Dolomitico http://ald.sbg.ac.at/ald/ald-i/index.php
Cited by
Cited by other publications
Goldstein, D. M.
Thornton, Anna M.
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