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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
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two 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

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