Abstract
Overabundance is the situation where two or more distinct word forms fill the same cell in an inflectional paradigm (Thornton 2011). While this topic has received renewed attention in recent years, there are still several open questions regarding its properties and status. In this paper we present a new take on the matter. On the basis of a case study of the locative singular and instrumental plural of Czech nouns, we argue that there are at least two kinds of overabundance phenomena which should be distinguished, depending on whether overabundant behavior integrates in the inflection system or is orthogonal to it. The evidence for the distinction comes from a quantitative study of the way phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic, and sociolinguistic factors contribute to partially predicting whether a lexeme is overabundant and which form is used in different contexts.
Highlights
Guzmán Naranjo and BonamiOverabundance is the situation where two or more distinct wordforms fill the same cell in an Glossa: a journal of general linguistics inflectional paradigm (Thornton 2011)
In the remainder of this paper we turn to our main topic: how does overabundance interact with inflectional classification? In section 2, we examine the predictability of overabundance: we show that, in the locative singular, the overabundant character of a noun is predictable from its stem shape and distribution, while this is not the case in the instrumental plural
In this paper we attempted to improve the state of the art in this area, both by exploring in depth how alternate inflection strategies interact within a single system, and by relying on quantitative modeling to explore the fine properties of overabundance phenomena
Summary
Guzmán Naranjo and BonamiOverabundance is the situation where two or more distinct wordforms fill the same cell in an Glossa: a journal of general linguistics inflectional paradigm (Thornton 2011). Thornton’s efforts in the last decade (Thornton 2011; 2012; 2019a;b) succeeded in putting the problem on the agenda, leading to a number of theoretical discussions (Stump 2016; Bonami & Crysmann 2018; Guzmán Naranjo 2019; Beniamine 2021) and renewed interest in detailed empirical studies (see among many others Bošnjak Botica & Hržica 2016; Cappellaro 2013; Lečić 2015; Rosemeyer & Schwenter 2019; Santilli 2014; Thornton 2012), some more general questions still remain unanswered. The clarified empirical landscape allowed Thornton (2019b) to start laying out a typology of overabundance. She identifies four main dimensions of variation in how overabundance manifests itself, which we may describe as follows.
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