Abstract
Abstract The Italian preterite (passato remoto, PR) is the only verb tense that has two series of equivalent endings for a single group of verbs ending in -ere. In the PR’s actual use, one notes, however, a strong preference for choosing one of the two inflexional paradigms of a given verb, which remains unattested in Italian grammatical studies. With this article, then, I intend to examine 1) what the actual usage is of the regular inflected forms of the PR in the largest corpora of written Italian; 2) how the regular second conjugation of the PR is presented in the most important Italian dictionaries. I believe that the results of this examination provide an important contribution regarding the formation of grammatical rules pertaining to the PR, but they also contribute to the debate on grammatical norms and on the actual usage of the Italian language.
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