After selecting some cases of morphological variation which are particularly salient in Spanish diminutive formation (the alternation among -itV, -citV and -ecitV allomorphs), this paper is aimed to define the formal conditions that control this variation and the groups of words that are affected by this alternation. As we shall see, these are the following: disyllabic bases with diphthong and ending in /o, a/; disyllabic bases ending in /e/; and monosyllabic bases.
We will deal first with the issue of contemporary dialect distribution of these allomorphs. We will afterwards attempt to make a first effort to define chronologically the beginnings, the development and the extension of each one of the competing allomorphs.
In our approach to both issues we will basically make use of the information provided in current corpora and online databases, as well as descriptive and theoretical bibliography and reference grammars.