Extravagant Morphology

In this paper we analyse the formal and functional ‘extravagance’ of general extenders embedded within morphological schemas, either at the end of coordinate compounds, or as constituents of complex words, especially at the end of lists of complex words formed according to the same schema. After discussing two case studies from Italian ( eccetera ‘etcetera’ and tutto ‘everything/all’), we conclude that complex words containing general extenders are ‘wild words’, namely ‘contextuals’ (Clark &