Overabundance resulting from language contact

The reduction of morphological complexity, particularly in inflectional paradigms, is not uncommon in language contact. One area of morphological complexity which has received less attention is variation within the cells of a paradigm, e.g. ‘dived’ and ‘dove’ as different past tense word forms of {DIVE} in English. This type of morphological complexity, where multiple forms are realized in the same cell in a paradigm is termed ‘overabundance’. This chapter examines the development of overabundance in the subject-marking system of Gurindji Kriol, and claims that increasing complexity in this dimension is the result of language contact. We analyse new data from Gurindji children using generalized linear mixed models to determine whether the complexity in the case paradigm has stabilized or whether complexification is on-going. We show that overabundance in Gurindji Kriol is an example of a contact-induced change which involves the complexification of an inflectional paradigm rather than its simplification.