Overabundance and inflectional classification: Quantitative evidence from Czech

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.