Lenition and morphology in Finnish

Kaden Holladay

doi:10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4503

Abstract

This paper investigates an interaction between consonant lenition and morphology in Finnish. The language has a process of consonant lenition whereby underlying geminate consonants at syllable boundaries lenite (degeminate) when the addition of an affix makes the post-geminate rime bimoraic. A small class of possessor agreement affixes do not condition lenition, even if they create the appropriate phonological environment. A puzzling interaction emerges when possessor agreement affixes are stacked on top of certain lenition-conditioning affixes. I account for this interaction in a way that improves on Kiparsky’s (2003) analysis. In doing so, I extend Pater’s (2010) method for modeling exceptional phonology via lexically-indexed constraints.

Highlights

Background and the puzzleFinnish has a process of consonant lenition whereby underlying geminate stops at syllable boundaries degeminate when the post-geminate rime becomes bimoraic (Antilla 1997, Kiparsky 2003)
Candidates (40c) and (40d) here contain [n], supplied by GEN.SG. This consonant is situated between the possessor agreement affixes (POSS) affix and a vowel, so a violation of alignment constraint (ALIGN) is incurred for both candidates, which are ruled out regardless of whether lenition occurs on the underlying root geminate
My analysis shifted the locus of explanation for the constellation of affixation and lenition facts entirely into the phonology

Summary

Introduction

Background and the puzzleFinnish has a process of consonant lenition ( termed gradation in the Uralic literature) whereby underlying geminate stops at syllable boundaries degeminate when the post-geminate rime becomes bimoraic (Antilla 1997, Kiparsky 2003). Violations of this constraint are incurred only when a morpheme already present in the morpho-phonological derivation surfaces with no exponent. This analysis unifies the treatment of multisegmental, consonant-final affixes with the treatment of mono-consonantal affixes, in that I derive the fact that POSS affixes always surface right-adjacent to vowels with a single M>>F ranking.

Results

Conclusion