O związkach między nieregularną redukcją a analogią
On the Relation between Irregular Reduction and Analogy

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses cases of phonological reduction triggered by high frequency and the role of analogy accompanying such processes. Section 1 illustrates the problem of the correlation between the size of a linguistic unit and its frequency bringing evidence from Swahili where the phenomenon is systematically observed and from Polish where it appears rather sporadically. Section 2 demonstrates that reduction in grammaticalization often is goal-oriented, as for example, in the case of the Polish past tense clitics evolving in the direction of inflectional suffixes. Section 3 discusses the colloquial change in the past tense paradigm of verb iść ‘to go’ which involves high frequency-triggered reduction using a mechanism of analogical stem-copying, while another analogical process (“lexical diffusion”) extends the innovation on derived verbs sharing the same root.

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