Troubles with flexemes

This paper investigates an aspect of the notion flexeme (French flexème), introduced by Fra-
din & 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 over-
abundance 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 dif-
ferent 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 pro-
posed 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.