Paradigm Uniformity and the French Gender System

Corbett’s view of canonical inflection (see, for example, Corbett 2009) holds that, in the canonical case, all lexemes belonging to the same part of speech should have the same paradigm structure. Obvious violations of the canon are defectivity (a lexeme missing a paradigm cell) and overdifferentiation (a lexeme with an extra paradigm cell). These are usually defined in terms of lexical exceptionalism: we have an expected paradigm shape, and a few irregular lexemes unexpectedly deviate from that paradigm shape. Another interesting family of deviations from paradigm uniformity involve situations where there is a systematic distinction of multiple paradigm shapes within