Troubles with flexemes

This paper investigates an aspect of the notion flexeme (French flexème), introduced by Fradin & Kerleroux (2003), Fradin (2003). After a brief review of how this concept developed in these authors’ work, and of how these authors conceive of lexemes (Section 2), the relation between flexemes and overabundance (Thornton 2011, 2012) is explored. Overabundance is introduced in Section 3, and Section 4 is devoted to some case studies, from Italian and other languages. It is shown that a single lexeme can map to more than one flexeme – and overabundance results from this mapping. Besides, it is shown that flexemes differing from each other in parallel ways can have various relations with lexemes: in some cases, mapping to different flexemes distinguishes two lexemes that are homophonous in their citation form (e.g., Italian succedere¹ ‘happen’ with pst.ptcp successo and succedere² ‘succeed’ with pst.ptcp succeduto), while in other cases flexemes that differ from each other in a way parallel to the previous one map to a single overabundant lexeme (e.g., Italian perdere ‘lose’ with pst.ptcp perso and perduto). I conclude that the distinction between lexemes and flexemes first proposed by Fradin & Kerleroux (2003) and Fradin (2003), as well as their definition of lexeme, based on semantic and constructional coherence rather than on inflectional coherence, is useful even beyond the area of lexeme formation for which it was originally proposed.