Trajectories of change in paradigmatic cells in Czech

We examine a well-known phenomenon in the development of the Czech nominal declension system: the gradual supplanting of the original o-stem ending in the locative singular with the u-stem ending. We observe that, contrary to expectations from the literature based primarily on studies of English, this shift has been in progress for a millennium and, in the high-frequency nouns for which we have enough data to observe, the opposing trend is also frequently in evidence: the o-stem ending is introduced to lexemes where it was not found earlier. In the absence of a single, overriding motivation that could have derailed this shift from following the classic ‘S-curve’ pattern, we propose re-examining the retextualization model as a more fitting one for the complex interaction of factors and forms found in languages with complex inflectional morphology.