Resumen de A romance solution to Spanish "soy", "voy", "doy", "estoy"
The change from Medieval Spanish "(yo) so, do, vo, estó" to modern "(yo) soy, doy, voy, estoy" still requires a plausible explanation in spite of the many proposals in the literature. A pan-Romance perspective recognizes wide-spread analogical deformations of the Latin 1s pres ind form SUM "I am". Using an electronic corpus of Medieval Spanish texts, "(yo) soy" turns out to predate the other three form by almost 200 years. These new data stablish a verb-specific analogy from the Lat. 1s preterit FUI with ending +i as the source of the anti-etymological ending first in "so", and later on in the other three verbs. The development traced here provides evidence for a more articulated and useful notion of analogy for historical morphological processes.
