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Finnish Sound Structure. Phonetics, Phonology, Phonotactics and Prosody

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Finnish Sound Structure. Phonetics, Phonology, Phonotactics and Prosody 9 ISBN 978-951-42-8983-5 ISSN 1796-4725 Suomi, Toivanen & Ylitalo & Toivanen Suomi, Kari Suomi, Juhani Toivanen & Riikka Ylitalo FINNISH SOUND STRUCTURE: FINNISH SOUND STRUCTURE: FINNISH SOUND STRUCTURE Phonetics, phonology, phonotactics and prosody Phonetics, phonology, phonotactics and prosody KANSI RAIMO AHONEN STUDIA HUMANIORA OULUENSIA 9 KARI SUOMI, JUHANI TOIVANEN & RIIKKA YLITALO FINNISH SOUND STRUCTURE Phonetics, phonology, phonotactics and prosody UNIVERSITY OF OULU, OULU, FINLAND 2008 Copyright @ 2008 Studia humaniora ouluensia 9 Editor-in-chief: Prof. Olavi K. Fält Editorial secretary: Lect. Elise Kärkkäinen Editorial Board: Prof. Maija-Leena Huotari Prof. Sari Kunnari Prof. Anni-Siiri Länsman Lect. Taina Kinnunen Lect. Elise Kärkkäinen Lect. Jari Okkonen Publishing office and distribution: Faculty of Humanities Linnanmaa P.O.Box 1000 90014 University of Oulu Finland ISBN 978-951-42-8983-5 ISSN 1796-4725 (URL: http://herkules.oulu.fi/issn17964725) ALSO AVAILABLE IN ELECTRONIC FORMAT ISBN 978-951-42-8984-2 (URL: http://herkules.oulu.fi/isbn9789514289842) Typesetting: Heikki Keränen Cover Design: Raimo Ahonen OULU UNIVERSITY PRESS OULU 2008 Preface This book attempts at a description of the sound structure of Standard Spoken Finnish, intended for an international audience familiar with the basic concepts of phonetics, phonology and linguistics. No prior knowledge of Finnish, a Finno- Ugric (and ultimately Uralic) language, is presupposed. The book describes the phonemes and their allophones, the phonotactics and the prosodic system of the language, and it is based on the corresponding parts of our textbook in Finnish (Suomi, Toivanen & Ylitalo 2006), albeit updated and adapted in many ways to the intended readership. To our knowledge, no equally comprehensive description of Finnish sound structure is currently available. The description of the prosodic system is to a considerable extent based on our own recent research. Including phonotactics along with segmental phonetics and prosody may seem an odd decision. However, we feel that the inclusion of phonotactics is warranted for at least four reasons. Firstly, Finnish is a full-fledged quantity language in which both consonant and vowel durations are contrastive, independently of each other, and of word stress, and according to the standard phonological interpretation, the quantity opposition is a matter of phonotactics: in a given word position, there may be a contrast between one phoneme or a sequence of two identical phonemes. Secondly, given the standard interpretation of the quantity opposition, sequences of up to four vowel phonemes in a word are possible; across a word boundary, even longer sequences of vowels can occur. Thirdly, Finnish has vowel harmony, as a result of which only certain vowels can co-occur in a word; in our view, vowel harmony is best described as a phonotactic restriction, although it is sometimes treated as a prosodic property. Fourthly, in many descriptions of Finnish available in English, the phonotactics of especially word-initial consonants is described in a way that is clearly unrealistic in view of the situation in modern Standard Spoken Finnish. We therefore feel that excluding these phonotactic properties would result in an inadequate picture of the sound structure of the language. The book aims at a description of the Finnish sound structure, and the descriptive frameworks used in the various chapters of the book are mostly intentionally as theoretically shallow and neutral as has seemed possible. The intention is to provide primary data on Finnish, data that researchers with different theoretical inclinations hopefully find useful for their own purposes. 3 Segment durations serve both lexical and postlexical functions in Finnish, in contrast to many other languages, and we therefore often repeat rather detailed numerical results of the original papers. In doing this, we only report results whose statistical significance has been tested in the original papers. It has been our goal that the reader should get an adequate idea of the factors influencing segment durations without necessarily consulting the original papers. Although morphophonological alternations of many kinds are a characteristic property of Finnish, we do not describe them systematically, but offer a glimpse at them in Chapter 1. For example, Grade Alternation is a common type of morphophonological alternations in Finnish. The nominative singular form of ‘lamb’ is lammas, the genitive singular form is lampaan. That is, the weak grade /mm/ sequence alternates with the strong grade sequence /mp/. We do not describe such alternations systematically for two reasons. Firstly, morphophono- logical alternations are properties of morphemes and, phonologically and phonetically, segments that participate in alternations in their respective morphemes do not differ from those segments that do not participate in any alternation in their respective morphemes; at least, there is no phonological difference in models of phonology that are relatively surface-oriented. Thus e.g. the sequence /mm/ in lammas is not, at least phonetically, in any way different from the same sequence in tamma ‘mare’, a word that does not participate in grade alternation. Secondly, there are descriptions of Finnish morphophonological alternations available in English, albeit not exhaustive ones, in grammars such as Karlsson (1999) and Sulkala & Karjalainen (1992); readers interested in aspects of Finnish not dealt with in this book are advised to consult these sources. Besides offering a glimpse at morphophonological alternations, Chapter 1 also briefly exemplifies inflection and word formation by derivation; these often involve morphophonological alternations. Hopefully, Chapter 1 gives an adequate overall picture of the structure of Finnish words. We wish to thank Matthew Gordon (University of California, Santa Barbara) for useful comments on the manuscript of this book. Any errors and inconsistencies that remain are our own. Oulu, December 2008 Kari Suomi Juhani Toivanen Riikka Ylitalo 4 Contents Preface 3 Contents 5 1 . Standard Spoken Finnish: definition and some structural properties 7 2 Airstream mechanisms and phonation 17 3 Phonemes and allophones 19 3.1 Vowels ............................................................................................................ 20 3.2 Consonants ..................................................................................................... 23 4 On the phonological interpretation of the quantity opposition 39 5 Sandhi phenomena 43 5.1 Nasal assimilation .......................................................................................... 43 5.2 Boundary lengthening ................................................................................... 44 5.3 The glottal stop .............................................................................................. 46 6 Phonotactics 49 6.1 Vowel phonotactics ........................................................................................ 49 6.1.1 Vowel sequences................................................................................. 49 6.1.2 Vowel harmony ................................................................................... 51 6.2 Consonant phonotactics ................................................................................ 55 6.2.1 Word-initial consonant sequences ..................................................... 55 6.2.2 Word-internal consonant sequences .................................................. 56 6.2.3 Word-final consonant sequences ....................................................... 59 6.3 Restrictions on #CV, #VV and #(C)VVCC sequences ............................... 61 7 Syllable and mora structure 65 8 Canonical word structure, minimal word, minimal utterance 69 9 Word-level Prosody 75 9.1 Degrees of word stress and their phonetic realisation ................................. 75 9.2 The phonetic realisation of accent ................................................................ 78 9.3 Segment durations and moraic structure ...................................................... 85 9.4 Segment durations and a speech timing model ......................................... 101 10 Utterance-level prosody 111 10.1 Orientation ................................................................................................. 111 10.2 Accent and information structure ............................................................. 112 10.3 Intonation ................................................................................................... 114 10.4 Rising intonation ....................................................................................... 117 5 10.5 Descriptive frameworks for Finnish intonation ...................................... 120 10.6 Intonation range ........................................................................................ 125 10.7 Intonation of Finnish as a second language ............................................ 126 10.8 Emotional Finnish speech: research questions, data bases and tools ............................................................................................................ 130 10.9 Emotion in spoken Finnish: evidence from classification experiments ............................................................................................... 133 10.10 A summary of some things glottal ......................................................... 136 11 Sound structure
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