Dialectal Gemination in Finnish: Phonetics/Phonology Interplay in Moraic Theory
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Dialectal gemination in Finnish: Phonetics/phonology interplay in moraic theory Christopher Spahr Forum Paper Submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree of Master of Arts University of Toronto c 2011 Christopher Spahr Contents Contents i Acknowledgments iii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 FinnishPhonology ....................... 3 1.2 Gemination and Degemination . 7 2 Gemination: A Dialectal Phenomenon 11 2.1 “Standard Finnish” and Finnish Dialects . 12 2.2 An Informal Typology of Dialectal Gemination . 15 2.2.1 Phonetic Gemination . 16 2.2.2 Phonemic Gemination . 17 2.2.3 Morphological Gemination . 21 2.2.4 Summary ........................ 22 3 Moraic Structure 23 3.1 MoraCountandMoraicTheory . 24 i ii CONTENTS 3.2 SecondMoraLengthening . 30 3.3 DefiningtheMora: Whatdoesitdo? . 33 3.3.1 LengthandDuration . 33 3.3.2 Weight and Timing . 34 4 Second Mora Lengthening and Primary Gemination 37 4.1 EvidenceforaCorrelation . 38 4.2 Modeling Primary Gemination . 40 4.2.1 APreviousAccount .................. 42 4.2.2 TheSynchronicConnection . 45 4.2.3 Gemination Before Diphthongs . 49 4.2.4 GradientEffects: AModelforChange . 57 4.2.5 Summary ........................ 59 5 Additional Issues and Closing Remarks 61 5.1 FurtherTheoreticalIssues . 61 5.1.1 Underlying Representations . 62 5.1.2 Segmental Phonology and Syllabification . 63 5.1.3 PhoneticInterpretation. 65 5.2 Conclusions ........................... 66 5.3 DirectionsforFutureResearch. 67 References 69 Acknowledgments Writing a forum paper is not an easy task, or at least so the clich´egoes. Actually I found it quite manageable, though by no means trivial; the real challenge was making it to the forum meetings at 9 o’clock every Tuesday morning. Nonetheless, there are some people I should mention who made the process easier. Keep in mind that none of the errors or bad calls in this paper are the fault of anyone mentioned below. They are entirely my own. First and foremost, because misery loves company, I’d like to thank my fellow members of the 2010–2011 MA forum group. I give the names of all thirteen of them in alphabetical order, as not to show favourites:1 Andrei Anghelescu, Elise Benallick, Marisa Brook, James Byrnes, Erin Chen, Radu Craioveanu, Ross Godfrey, Isobel Marr, Christian Mutikainen, Madeline “Maddie” Shellgren, Michelle Stella, Brigid Thurgood, and Holly Young. It is a great shame that I may not have succeeded in my goal of earning myself a footnote for my invaluable assistance in each and every one of your own forum papers, but I hope that I provided at least some moral support in the process, as you all certainly did for me. I wish you all the greatest success in your future endeavours, academic or otherwise. I’d also like to thank the graduate co¨ordinator Sali Tagliamonte for giving us a hard time when it was necessary, and for acting impressed when I pointed out that I managed to finish my full two semesters of MA coursework without missing a single class, including those 9a.m. forum “get-togethers”. This paper would not have been possible without academic guidance, and so I owe my sincerest thanks to my advisor, Elan Dresher. His knowl- edge, thoroughness, humour, and tolerance for me when my opinions on 1This is not to say that I don’t have favourites, as I do of course; you know who you A are. Extra credit if you’ve ever pushed me to/helped me use LTEX or have spent time with me in an Ethiopian restaurant. iii iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS some specific representational issues differed has helped me both to proceed in my never-ending quest to become a real phonologist, and to “be myself”, as it were (after all, what good is linguistics without a little style?) Further- more my thanks go out to my second reader, Keren Rice, for having a fresh look at the whole paper and suggesting a number of revisions, fortunately none of them too major! I would also like to thank Elizabeth Cowper. Although I only know her academically as a course instructor in Intermediate Syntax (which I took to calling “remedial syntax”, due to my own shortcomings in the subject area), it was in this class that I came to really internalize the importance of making clear one’s assumptions in linguistic writing. Unfortunately, this has made me a bit hyper-aware, and has sort of spilled over in to my non- linguistic life (as if I have one of those!). My apologies if the expected quality of argumentation is not readily apparent in the present work. For giving me some native speaker intuitions, and reaffirming my sus- picions about where primary gemination can apply (it really can to any CVCVV´ word, it seems!), I thank Jari Simil¨a. I also thank my parents, Linda Spahr and Stephen Spahr, for supporting my decision to pursue academia instead of getting a real job.2 An MA is just the first step down an exceedingly long path, but I trust that they’ll continue to cheer me on along the way. Finally, I must make mention of the bidding which took place during the summer meeting of the MA cohort, after noticing how often a paper on this topic makes use of the word “gemination”. The number of instances of this string3 was compared to the list of bids from the meeting several months earlier, according to “Price Is Right” rules (closest without going over). The winner was Madeline Shellgren. Congratulations, Maddie! And with that, I give you my year’s work. Christopher Spahr September 17, 2011 2Don’t think that this would have been impossible without their support, though, as I would have gone ahead and done it anyway. 3The version that went out to my second reader contained 139, for the record, and that’s not counting headers or the table of contents. Subsequent revisions seem to have added several more! Chapter 1 Introduction The Finnish language possesses a quantity distinction between short and long vowels and singleton and geminate consonants, regardless of primary stress placement (which always occurs on the initial syllable), as well as ag- glutinative morphology. Because of this combination, Finnish has proved an interesting testing ground for both phonological and morphological studies in the theoretical linguistic literature. The vast majority of work in generative phonology has been on “Stan- dard Finnish”, often without defining the term. Because spoken Finnish is really a collection of dialects varying mainly in their phonology, it is a wonder that so much theoretical work has gone into modeling the system of an artificially constructed standard, rather than looking at dialects as the individual varieties that they are. The focus here is on a phonological process present in a number of 1 2 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION dialects of Finnish known as primary gemination. In primary gemination, a singleton consonant is geminated between a stressed short vowel and an unstressed long vowel: (1.1) CVC´ αVV → CVC´ αCαVV Although primary gemination is well known in the Finnish literature, most publications have been either descriptive (see Paunonen 1973 for an example of an article in English) or quantitative (such as Nahkola 1987); there has been almost no research done within generative phonology looking at primary gemination. The only example of generative work along these lines of which I am currently aware is Harrikari (2003), which focuses on two related but distinct types of dialectal gemination.1 The goals of the present study are twofold. The first is to expand the generative phonological literature on Finnish dialectal phonology by exam- ining a dialectal phenomenon (primary gemination), placing it within the context of both the typology of related dialectal gemination processes and the diachronic rise of those processes. The second is to provide an orig- inal contribution to moraic theory with regards to the interplay between phonetics and phonology. The analysis presented in chapter 4 is based on evidence of this interplay: the additional weight attributed by a phonetic process (second mora lengthening) causes phonological gemination under the right prosodic conditions (in words of the shape CVCVV). 1These are, namely, “special” gemination and South-Western gemination, both of which are discussed in chapter 2. 1.1. FINNISH PHONOLOGY 3 The remainder of this chapter gives an overview of Finnish phonology. Chapter 2 covers the sociolinguistic status of Finnish dialects and provides a typology of dialectal gemination processes. Chapter 3 discusses moraic structure in Finnish and the system of representations used in this study with regards to syllable structure. Chapter 4 lays out the analysis at the core of this study, identifying second mora lengthening as the root cause of primary gemination. Chapter five touches on some additional theoretical issues and concludes the paper. 1.1 Finnish Phonology The spoken Finnish language exists as something of a dialect continuum, and the greatest source of variation between Finnish dialects is in phonology. This section gives a basic overview of Finnish phonology in order to give the reader a sense of what all dialects of Finnish have in common. Finnish has eight vowel phonemes, which are given in Figure 1.1. The vowels are given using Finnish orthography; approximate IPA values are given in brackets where they differ from the orthography. Suomi et al. (2008:23) note that all dialects of Finnish have these same eight vowel phonemes, although the exact phonetic realization of these phonemes can vary slightly between dialects. Finnish has a system of front-back vowel harmony. In this system, vowels in suffixes added to words must agree in backness with vowels of 4 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION Figure 1.1: Vowel Phonemes of Finnish Front Back High i y u Mid e ¨o[ø] o Low ¨a[æ] a [A] the stem.