La morfologia nominale: polimorfismo e polifunzionalismo nei sistemi di flessione

The chapter deals with the problems posed by the analysis of the noun inflectional morphology and the methods to approach them. It describes the morphological variability of a number of lexical types of various inflectional classes and with high frequency of tokens. The conceptual foci of the discussion are the notions of polymorphism and polyfunctionalism, the first defined as the property whereby a function is realised by many forms, the latter as the property of a form that has many functions. It is argued that both notions are relevant to describe the irregular patterns of the noun inflectional morphology of the documents. These notions are also useful to try to understand the paths along which the collapse of the Latin declension systems and the new organisation in the vernacular paradigms took place.