Analogy and phonology

Abstract

One of the more welcome developments in generative phonology has been the acceptance of the long-established and well-known concept that the morphophonemic structure of a language may be reorganized in an attempt to establish ‘paradigmatic coherence’, that is to say, a major rôle of analogy is to eliminate or minimize allomorphic variation within a paradigm. Of course it would be wrong to suppose that analogical change is restricted to the elimination of allomorphy; indeed, it is even possible to find examples of analogical change which increase allomorphy, as in the development of the plural imperative form onto:n of Greek einai ‘to be’ in place of the more regular esto:n.1 But, since analogical elimination of allomorphy plays such a crucial rôle in linguistic change, we may safely concentrate on that aspect of analogy in this paper without denying the many other types of change in which analogy plays a part.