Overabundance (multiple forms realizing the same cell): a non-canonical phenomenon in Italian verb morphology.

The chapter deals with overabundance, a non-canonical situation in which certain lexemes exhibit cell-mates, i.e., more than one inflected form to fill one and the same cell of their paradigm (realize the same set of morphosyntactic features). An exhaustive set of cases of overabundance in Italian verb inflection is described, and their relative canonicity is assessed by means of criteria of canonicity similar to those proposed by Corbett (2007a). Results show that overabundance, like other autonomously morphological phenomena, such as morphomic distribution of stems, tends to occur in the non-1st conjugation, and in paradigm partitions independently established for the language.