This paper studies morphological variation of second inflectional class passive imperfect verbs in Modern Greek with the aim to provide a description of speakers’ preferences towards particular forms on the basis of authentic data coming from a large corpus of Modern Greek (Greek Web 2019), as well as questionnaires administered to students. All third person (singular and plural) morphologically alternative types of six verbs, belonging to different frequency bands (θeoˈrume, apoteˈlume, ekteˈlume, ekseˈrume, δjaforopiˈume and aksiopiˈume) were identified through corpus analysis.

The quantitative analysis of corpus data indicated the presence of multiple competitive variants for the 3rd singular person, among which -undan is the dominant form, as well as a clear trend towards the restriction of variation in the 3rd person plural. At the same time, questionnaires suggested the potential of the more recent suffix -utan for the 3rd singular person, which is more transparent than the standard -undan.

Apart from the description of morphological variation in passive imperfect, this paper stresses the need to combine different methodologies for a multifaceted analysis of the linguistic phenomenon in question