Analogy as a source of suppletion

Analogy is often seen as a force that restores morphological patterns disrupted by regular sound change, but analogy also plays a nearly unexamined role in the creation of the most extreme kind of irregularity – suppletion. Fisterran Galician ir ‘go’ has analogical past imperfective forms based on the semantically linked verb vir ‘come’. Regular loss of -n- in certain forms and palatalization in others facilitated a proportional analogy: vir : viña :: ir : X, X = iña, with a non-etymological nasal creating weak suppletion. Analogy not only sometimes fails to promote regularization but in fact runs counter to it. Analogy is a key factor in suppletion and highlights important semantic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic considerations in the development of suppletion.