Reorganising Grammatical Variation

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 per