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The Map and the Rope Finnish Nominal Inflection as a Learning Target STUDIA PHILOLOGICA JYV ASKYLAENSIA 38 Maisa Martin The Map and the Rope Finnish Nominal Inflection as a Learning Target '::::::;7~ UNIVERSITY OF ~ JYVAsKYIJ\. JYV ASKYLA 1995 Editor Raija Markkanen, PhD Department of English University of JyvaskyHi ISBN 951-34-0637-7 (PDF ISSN 0585-5462 Copyright © 1995, by Maisa Martin and University of Jyvaskyla Cover: Painting by Sirkka Laukkarinen JyvaskyUi University Printing House and Sisasuomi Oy, Jyvaskyla 1995 ABSTRACT Martin, Maisa The map and the rope: Finnish nominal inflection as a learning target JyvaskyUi.: University of Jyvaskyla, 1995, 270 p. (Studia Philologica Jyvaskylaensia, ISSN 0585-5462; 38) ISBN 951-34-0637-7 Finnish summary Diss. The morphophonological stem changes which occur in the Finnish nominal inflection are studied from the learners' viewpoint. The method of the study is eclectic: three kinds of data are discussed against the background of several models of morphology and language acquisition. Test data were collected from learners and native speakers who were asked to inflect context-free real and nonce words. These data are subjected to both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The second data-type consists of interviews with learners, and the third was collected from the spontaneous utterances and writing of learners. The latter two types of data are qualitatively analyzed. All informants are adults with at least secondary education and represent many linguistic and cultural baCkgrounds. They have received formal teaching in Finnish and have been exposed to Finnish while visiting or living in Finland. The morphological issues discussed in the study are centred around the basic question of using rules vs. paradigms in the description of the nominal inflection. The mental representation of morphological infonnation is approached from the angles of classification, memory and processing mechanisms. Several recent models of morphological processing are reviewed. The data are used to determine to what extent the various models explain the morphological products of learners of Finnish. The study concludes that the production of Finnish inflectional forms by learners is based on more than one processing mechanism. The acquisition of Finnish morphology presents many types of cognitive problem, and the solutions need not be uniform in nature either. While rule descriptions may be well-suited to limited areas of morphology, they may be of little use in others. Analogical production has advantages in certain areas, and some features must be learned by rote. An attempt is made to find the best possible fit between the problematic areas of morphology and acquisition devices. The acquisition process of morphology is described as developing a native-like relief map of the morphological system. Both natural language acquisition and explicit teaching provide the learner with material for the rope which is necessary for climbing the hills on the map. CONTENTS ABSTRACT CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1 INTRODUCTION 7 2 LANGUAGE LEARNING AS A COGNITIVE TASK 14 2.1 The nature of categories 14 2.2 Storage and retrieval 18 2.3 Procedural and declarative knowledge 22 2.4 Mechanisms of processing: rules, connections, analogy and competition 26 2.5 Errors and crosslinguistic influence in morphology 38 3 MORPHOLOGICAL MODELS AND FINNISH MORPHOLOGY 44 3.1 General morphological models 44 3.2 Finnish morphology 53 3.2.1 Basic terms of Finnish morphology 53 3.2.2 Descriptions of Finnish morphology 55 3.2.3 Features of Finnish nominal inflection 60 4 DATA AND APPROACH 77 4.1 Approach to the data, from data to approach 77 4.2 Test data 81 4.3 Introspection data 83 4.4 The spontaneous data 86 5 INFLECTION OF CONTEXT-FREE WORDS 88 5.1 Correct responses and their rhyming counterparts 90 5.2 Variability of test responses 94 5.3 Order of difficulty of the test words 99 5.4 Missing and inappropriate responses 106 5.5 Responses to individual test words 110 5.5.1 Words ending in a vowel other than i or e 111 5.5.2 Words ending in an i or e 116 5.5.3 Words ending in a consonant 119 5.6 Factors influencing the inflection of context-free words 124 6 THE LEARNERS' VIEW: INTROSPECTION RESULTS 131 6.1 Learners as experts on language acquisition 131 6.2 Learners' views of inflectional strategies 138 6.3 Introspection results and inflectional processes 146 7 INFLECTION IN SPONTANEOUS PRODUCTION 150 7.1 Errors in stem formation 152 7.1.1 Consonant gradation 153 7.1.2 i/e-words 161 7.1.3 s-words and other words ending in a consonant 165 7.1.4 Plural forms 168 7.2 Other morphological errors 173 7.2.1 Choice of the suffix variant 173 7.2.2 Morpheme order, multiple endings, and non-inflection 176 7.2.3 Morphological awareness and conversational co-operation 181 8 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS 185 8.1. Nominal inflection as a learning target 185 8.2 Modelling morphology for learners 193 8.3 Modelling learner production 200 9 IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING 209 REFERENCES 219 LIST OF TABLES 238 APPENDICES 239 FINNISH SUMMARY 263 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We Finns, linguists and laynten alike, have lived surrounded by Finnish, thinking and communicating in it from our very first years. Later, school and academic education have moulded our views of it. Our knowledge of the language is unavoidably fused with these experiences. It is not possible for us to start from the beginning, with a clean slate, and examine the language as an object, without prejudice. To do this we need learners of Finnish, people who come to meet the language from the outside. Learners are naturally saddled with their own expectations and linguistic backgrounds, but when a sufficient number of them are involved, it can be hoped that some fragments of an unbiased view begin to emerge. It is, therefore, the learners of Finnish who are to be thanked for shaping my knowledge of the Finnish language. I have taught Finnish as a second or foreign language in many different settings and for many nationalities since 1973. Over the years I have observed the behaviour of learners of Finnish, and this experience has profoundly influenced my views on morphology and its acquisition processes. I have also been involved in writing teaching materials and developing teacher education and testing procedures for the field, both in Canada and Finland. This work has given me the opportunity to discuss the Finnish language and its acquisition with several hundred people who are involved in teaching Finnish for foreigners. Their experiences and views have been invaluable to me. The Finnish Academy research project Finnish as a Second and Foreign Language made it financially possible to concentrate solely on this project for the winter of 1992-1993. The project group of Eija Aalto, Sirkku Latomaa, Pirkko Muikku-Werner, Kirsti Siitonen, and Minna Suni, headed by Professor Karl Sajavaara, have provided me with unfailing support and innumerable opportunities for discussion, not to mention all the fun we had in the many meetings and seminars we have arranged and attended. The reviewers of the manuscript, Professors Matti Leiwo and Heikki Paunonen made many worthwhile suggestions for the improvement of the study. The former is also responsible for the initial push towards research in linguistics. Sirkka Laukkarinen made the map visible in her painting for the cover and Chapter 8. Thanks are also due to Sirkku Latomaa for her help with the Swedish and Norwegian transcriptions in Chapter 6, to Leena Peltomaa for her comments on the Finnish Summary, to Inka ViIen for making a book out of computer files of text and tables, and to David Wilson for his thorough, critical and wise advice as an expert on the English language. All the remaining errors are mine. My warmest thanks belong to my sons, Otto and Erik, for their tolerance of an often absent and nearly always absent-minded mother. JyvaskyHi November, 1995 M.M. 1 INTRODUCTION The locus of this study is that sparsely populated area where the disciplines of Finnish Language research and Applied Linguistics - or more specifically" the study of second language acquisition meet. The task of this introductory chapter is to locate it within this space, as well as to state and describe the research problem. Arguments for the choices and limitations of the study are also presented, methodological standpoints fixed, and the structure of the study outlined. The Finnish nominal inflection has not previously been described as a learning task. Thus my overall research question is: What are the essential features of the central area of the Finnish nominal inflection as a system to be learnt? Other questions derived from this are: How do learners inflect nominals? Does the description of the system influence learning? Can new light be shed on the learning of inflection by recent models of language processing and acquisition? Why this topic? Because Finnish has so many case endings Finns and foreigners alike claim that it is a "difficult" language. Prepositions in the "easy" Indo-European languages, however, outnumber the Finnish cases, often have similar functions, and are equally unpredictably used. This counterargument usually satisfies FinnsI' while foreigners who have learnt at least some Finnish know better: it is not the case endings but the stem shapes which are bothersome in the early stages of learning. Why do Finns, apart from specialists in the Finnish language, not notice the stem alternations? One answer is that for an adult Finn they are automatic. We only notice them when small children make mistakes or somebody inflects a rare word in a way which sounds wrong to us. Then we chuckle or correct" but rarely analyze the problem in any way.

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