Cover not available
Part of
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
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Overabundance
  • 3.Genesis of overabundance: Type I: ‘form’ competition
    • 3.1Italian third person pronouns
    • 3.2Genesis of the egli/esso and ella/essa competition
  • 4.Genetic Type II: Rule competition
    • 4.1Ampezzan (Ladin) plurals within the Romance context
    • 4.2Persistence across millennia: The case of Latin sepultus/sepelitus and its Romance continuants
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 24 October 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.203.05cap
References (52)
Adger, David
2006 Combinatorial variability. Journal of Linguistics 43: 695–700.Google Scholar
Adger, David & Smith, Jennifer
2010 Variation and the Minimalist Program. In Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the Biological and the Social [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 265], Leonie Cornips & Karen P. Corrigan (eds), 149–178. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Apollonio, Bruno
1987[1930] Grammatica del dialetto ampezzano. Cortina d’Ampezzo: Cooperativa di consumo.Google Scholar
Aronoff, Mark
1994 Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes. Cambridge MA: The MIT press.Google Scholar
Barbato, Marcello
2010 Il principio di dissimilazione e il plurale di I classe. Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 126: 39–70.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bentley, Delia
2018 Monotonicity in word formation: the case of Italo-Romance result state adjectives. Transactions of the Philological Society. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Blevins, James
2016 Word and Paradigm Morphology. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bordal Hertzenberg, Mari Johanne
2015 Third Person Reference in Late Latin. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cappellaro, Chiara
2013 Overabundance in diachrony: A case study. In The Boundaries of Pure Morphology. Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives, Silvio Cruschina, Martin Maiden & John Charles Smith (eds), 209–220. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 Tonic personal pronouns: Morphophonology. In The Oxford Guide to Romance Languages, Martin Maiden & Adam Ledgeway (eds), 722–741. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 The semantic specialization of esso as [m-human] in standard Italian. Revue Romane 52(2): 113–136.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carstairs, Andrew
1987 Allomorphy in Inflexion. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Chambers, Jack K.
2006 Studying language variation: an informal epistemology. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, Jack K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill & Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds), 3–14. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Corbett, Greville
2005 The canonical approach in typology. In Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories [Studies in Language Companion Series 72], Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Adam Hodges & David S. Rood (eds), 25–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007a Canonical typology, suppletion, and possible words. Language 83(1): 8–41.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007b Deponency, syncretism, and what lies between. Proceedings of the British Academy 145: 21–43.Google Scholar
Cordin, Patrizia
2001 Pronomi personali. In Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, Lorenzo Renzi, Giampaolo Salvi & Anna Cardinaletti (eds), 549–563. Bologna: il Mulino.Google Scholar
Cornagliotti, Anna
1988 Una storia biblica in antico genovese: Preliminari per una edizione. In Miscellanea di studi offerti a Giuliano Gasca Queirazza, Cornagliotti, Anna, Lucia Fontanella, Marco Piccat, Alda Rossebastiano & Alessandro Vitale Brovarone (eds), 897–909. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso.Google Scholar
D’Achille, Paolo
1990 Sintassi del parlato e tradizione scritta della lingua italiana. Rome: Bonacci.Google Scholar
Delogu, Ignazio
(ed.) 1997 Il condaghe di San Pietro di Silki. Testo logudorese inedito dei secoli XI-XIII. Sassari: Libreria Dessì Editrice.Google Scholar
Embick, David
2007 Variation and morphosyntactic theory: Competition fractionated. Language and Linguistics Compass 2: 59–78.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ernout, Alfred & Meillet, Antoine
1932 Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine. Histoire des Mots. Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar
Faraoni, Vincenzo
2010 L’origine dei plurali italiani in –e e – i. PhD dissertation, Università La Sapienza di Roma.Google Scholar
Fehringer, Carol
2004 How stable are morphological doublets? A case study of/[schwa]/∼ Ø variants in Dutch and German. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 16(4): 285–329.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
García-Cervigón, Alberto Hernando
2006 El participio en la GRAE (1771–1917) y en el dictamen de la Comisiò de Gramática (1861) de la Real Academia Española. Linguæ & – Rivista di Lingue e Culture Modern 4(2): 47–61.Google Scholar
Glare, Peter G. W.
1982 Oxford Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph H.
1966[2005] Language Universals. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Huback, Ana Paula
2011 Irregular plurals in Brazilian Portuguese: An exemplar model approach. Language Variation and Change 23: 245–256.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hudson, Richard
1997 Inherent variability and linguistic theory. Cognitive Linguistics 8: 63–108.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krifka, Manfred
2009 Case syncretism in German feminines: Typological, functional and structural aspects. In On Inflection, Patrick Steinkrüger & Manfred Krifka (eds), 141–171. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony
1994 Morphosyntactic variation. In Papers from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, Vol. 2, Katherine Beals (ed.), 180–201. Chicago IL: CLS.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W.
2007 Constructing the meanings of personal pronouns. In Aspects of Meaning Construction, Günter Radden, Klaus-Michael Köpcke, Thomas Berg & Peter Siemund (eds), 171–187. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lass, Roger
1990 How to do things with junk: Exaptation in language evolution. Journal of Linguistics 26: 79–102.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ledgeway, Adam
2012 From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leone, Fulvio
2003 I pronomi personali di terza persona. Roma: Carocci.Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin
1996 On the Romance inflectional endings –i and –e. Romance Philology 50: 147–182.Google Scholar
2000 Il sistema desinenziale del sostantivo italiano nell‘italoromanzo preletterario. Ricostruzione parziale a partire dai dati moderni (il significato storico del tipo ‘amici’). In La preistoria dell’italiano, József Herman & Anna Marinetti (eds), 167–179. Tübingen: Niemeyer.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matthews, Peter H.
1972 Inflectional Morphology: A Theoretical Study Based on Aspects of Latin Verb Conjugation. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Meader, Clarence Linton
1901 The Latin Pronouns Is, Hic, Iste, Ipse. A Semasiological Study. New York NY: Macmillan.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Monaci, Ernesto
1955 Crestomazia italiana dei primi secoli. Rome: Società editrice D. Alighieri.Google Scholar
Pagnoni, Adele
1942 Il dialetto di Cortina d’Ampezzo: Tesi di glottologia. Padova: Università degli studi.Google Scholar
Renzi, Lorenzo
1983 Fiorentino e italiano: Storia dei pronomi personali soggetto. In Italia linguistica: Idee, storia, strutture, Federico Albano Leoni, Daniele Gambarara, Franco Lo Piparo & Raffaele Simone (eds), 223–239. Bologna: il Mulino.Google Scholar
Sen, Ranjan
2015 Syllable and Segment in Latin. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stoppelli, Pasquale & Picchi, Eugenio
(eds) 2001 LIZ 4.0 – Letteratura Italiana Zanichelli. Bologna: Zanichelli.Google Scholar
Thornton, Anna Maria
2011 Overabundance (multiple cells realising the same cell): A non-canonical phenomenon in Italian verb morphology. In Morphological Autonomy: Perspectives from Romance Inflectional Morphology, Martin Maiden, John Charles Smith, Maria Goldbach & Marc-Olivier Hinzelin (eds), 358–381. Oxford: OUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012a Overabundance in Italian verb morphology and its interactions with other non-canonical phenomena. In Irregularity in Morphology (and Beyond), Thomas Stolz, Hitomi Otsuka, Alina Urdze & Johan van der Auwera (eds), 251–269. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.Google Scholar
2012b Reduction and maintenance of overabundance. A case study on Italian verb paradigms. Word Structure 5(2): 183–207.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Forthcoming. Overabundance: A canonical typology. In Competition in Morphology, Franz Rainer, Francesco Gardani, Hans-Christian Luschütsky & Wolfgang U. Dressler eds Dordrecht Springer
Vanelli, Laura
2008 La formazione del plurale in ampezzano. Ladin! V(1): 8–17.Google Scholar
Vincent, Nigel
1997 The emergence of the D-system in Romance. In Parameters and Morphosyntactic Change, Ans van Kemenade & Nigel Vincent (eds), 147–169. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
2016 A structural comparison of Latin and Romance. In The Oxford Guide to Romance Languages, Martin Maiden & Adam Ledgeway (eds), 37-49. Oxford: Oxford University Press.DOI logoGoogle Scholar

Electronic source

ALD, Atlante Ladino Dolomitico [URL]
Cited by (2)

Cited by 2 other publications

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

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 26 june 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.