Occasionallyattested

Occasionallyattested is a term used in linguistics to describe linguistic forms, senses, or features that appear in a language’s corpus or textual record only sporadically. An item described as occasionally attested has evidence of occurrence but lacks wide or systematic attestation across dialects, genres, or historical periods. This status is common for archaic, regional, nonce, or contact-induced forms, as well as rare inflected forms or senses that survive in a restricted corpus.

In corpus-based work, researchers often discuss attestation frequency, measured by tokens in a corpus or by the number of independent sources. Thresholds vary; some scholars label an item as occasionally attested if it appears in only a few tokens or sources, while others require broader source diversity before drawing conclusions. The designation signals that the form is unlikely to represent a core property of the language and may be of particular historical interest or marginal use.

Caution is required because occasionally attested forms can reflect genuine historical usage, but they are also prone to error, scribal mistakes, misreadings, hapax legomena, or citation biases. Distinguishing genuine occasional attestation from erroneous data requires careful scrutiny of manuscript context, orthographic variation, and corroboration from related texts, dialects, or cognate languages.

Applications include historical reconstruction, lexicography, and philology. Recognizing occasional attestation helps delimit the language’s attested inventory and can illuminate contact phenomena, lexical gaps, semantic shifts, or retention of archaisms that survive only in narrow niches.

See also: Attestation; Hapax legomenon; Corpus linguistics; Historical linguistics; Lexicography.