How exotic is Finnish?

1
How exotic is Finnish?

• Östen Dahl

2
The received view

• Genealogically, Finnish belongs to the Uralic
  languages
• Typologically, Uralic (and also Altaic) languages
  differ radically from Indo-European languages by
  being agglutinative rather than
  flectional/fusional

3
Testing the received view on data from WALS

• The World Atlas of Language Structures (2005)
  contains 142 maps of the distribution of
  phonological, grammatical and lexical phenomena
  in the languages in the world

4
What the received view predicts

• The data in WALS can be used to construct
  typological profiles and measure typological
  distances between languages
• Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish belong to the core
  sample in WALS
• The received view suggests that these
  agglutinative languages should form a tight
  cluster in the WALS data
• Lets look at the 222 best represented languages
  in WALS

5
Finnish and Hungarian do not cluster
Languages typologically closest to Finnish

• Most of the languages typologically closest to
  Finnish are in fact Indo-European
• Turkish and Hungarian are ranked after these

Armenian (Eastern) IE 22
Polish IE 25
Latvian IE 25
Nenets Uralic 25
Bulgarian IE 26
Lithuanian IE 26
Russian IE 27
Kashmiri IE 27
Evenki Altaic 28
Brahui Dravidian 28
Turkish Altaic 29
Hungarian Uralic 29
6
Classical morphological typology

• The languages of the world are said to all belong
  to one of four types
• isolating
• agglutinative
• fusional (inflecting, flectional)
• polysynthetic

7
Agglutinative languages (Wikipedia)

• Agglutinative languages have words containing
  several morphemes that are always clearly
  differentiable from one other in that each
  morpheme represents only one grammatical meaning
  and the boundaries between those morphemes are
  easily demarcated that is, the bound morphemes
  are affixes, and they may be individually
  identified.
• Agglutinative languages tend to have a high
  number of morphemes per word, and their
  morphology is highly regular.

8
Fusional languages (Wikipedia)

• Morphemes in fusional languages are not readily
  distinguishable from the root or among
  themselves. Several grammatical bits of meaning
  may be fused into one affix.
• Morphemes may also be expressed by internal
  phonological changes in the root (i.e.
  morphophonology), such as consonant gradation and
  vowel gradation, or by suprasegmental features
  such as stress or tone, which are of course
  inseparable from the root.

9
Which language is agglutinative?

• Finnish
• Nominative Illative sg Illative pl
• vesi veteen vesiin water
• Swedish
• hund-ar-na-s svans-ar kupera-de-s
• dog-PL-DEF-GEN tail-PL dock-PST-PASS
• the dogs tails were docked

It is not so difficult to find Finnish examples
that look fusional and Swedish examples that look
agglutinative
10
Bell curve parameters

• Typological parameters are continua rather than
  dichotomies
• Typological distributions tend to be normal Bell
  curves rather than inverted Bell curves

11
Inflectional synthesis of the verb
4-5
2-3
8-9
6-7
12-13
10-11
0-1
Finnish does not seem to have very complex verb
morphology!
12
Number of finite forms in Finnish and French

• Finnish
• present
• past
• conditional
• (potential)

• French (written)
• présent ind.
• présent subj.
• imparfait ind.
• imparfait subj.
• passé simple
• futur
• conditionnel

Indeed, Finnish has fewer finite verb forms than
e.g. French
13
Number of case forms (WALS)
The richness of the Finnish case system is quite
unusual typologically
4-5
no case
6-7
8-9
2
8-9
10-11
6-7
10-
5
3
4
14
Finnish as an agglutinative language

• Seeing Finnish as a language which is
  fundamentally different from other European
  languages because of its agglutinative character
• gives too much prominence to the
  agglutinativefusional dimension
• is misleading since Finnish is rather far from
  the extreme end of that dimension

15
The Finnish case system

• What is really special about Finnish (in
  particular in comparison to Germanic and Romance
  languages) is the rich case system.
• Interestingly, even if Finnish finite verb
  morphology is relatively poor there is a complex
  set of non-finite forms which is enhanced by case
  inflections (cf. Anne Tamms paper at this
  conference)

16
Importance of areal influence

• The typological profile of a language is often
  predicted better by its geographical location
  than by its genealogical affiliation
• Finnish is in many respects more similar to its
  European neighbours than to more closely related
  Uralic languages

17
OV/VO vs. PostP/PreP
Continental Asia mainly OV and postpositions
Europe mainly VO and prepositions
18
Indo-European word order
The border between VO/PreP and OV/PostP cuts
straight through the IE languages
19
Uralic word order
Uralic languages are all postpositional (or
almost), but western Uralic languages are VO
rather than OV
20
Harmonic vs. disharmonic types
The disharmonic combination of VO and
postpositions is found in a buffer zone between
the harmonic options
21
The West European profile
German Europe Indo-European -133
French Europe Indo-European -125
Spanish Europe Indo-European -120
English Europe Indo-European -119
Greek (Modern) Europe Indo-European -96
Russian Europe Indo-European -68
Latvian Europe Indo-European -60
Irish Europe Indo-European -58
Finnish Europe Uralic -51
Georgian Asia Kartvelian -38
What languages in the WALS database fit best the
profile of European languages west of 20 E?
22
Features that are over-represented in western
Europe

• Perfect from possessive
• Interrogative word order marks polar questions
• Negative indefinites show mixed behaviour w.r.t.
  predicate negation
• The language has markers that can code both
  situational and epistemic modality, both for
  possibility and for necessity.
• First and a small set of consecutive higher
  ordinal numerals are suppletive
• Relative pronoun used for relativization on
  objects
• Distributive numeral marked by preceding word
• Relative pronoun used for relativization on
  subjects
• Other action nominal construction

Boldface features are represented in Finnish
23
Distribution of some European features
24
Finnish as a European language

• Finnish is not quite a Standard Average
  European (SAE) language
• but comes fairly close to it

25
Euronormativity makes Finnish seem unique

• However, in linguistics we tend to find a strong
  tendency towards euronormativity
• SAE is taken as the normal way for languages to
  be
• In this perspective, differences between SAE and
  Finnish become salient
• and Finnish is exoticized and seen as unique
• which of course may be regarded as a highly
  desirable property

26
Sometimes it is SAE that is exotic

• An option that seems exotic in a European
  context may not at all be so globally
• For example, pro-drop, i.e. omission of
  pronominal subjects, is not usually possible in
  SAE languages (Germanic, Romance)
• Globally, however, pro-drop is the normal case

27
Expression of non-lexical subjects
Finnish mixed
Minority option (11) obligatory subject pronouns
Majority option (61) subject affixes on verbs
28
Everything may be equally exotic

• Sometimes, both SAE and Finnish represent
  minority options
• Consider predicative possession how does a
  language express I have a cow?
• SAE a transitive verb to have
• Finnish a locative construction minulla on NP

29
Predicative possession
In Stassens sample, have is the most common
option but still a minority one
The locational option is almost equally common
30
Is definiteness an Indo-European phenomenon?

• Paradoxically, euronormativity sometimes leads
  researchers to see bias where there is none
• Consider this quotation from an earlier plenary
  lecture (re definiteness in Finnish)
• is resolutely against importing categories from
  Indo-European linguistics for describing
  languages characterised by different structures
  and pragmatics

31
Definite articles in Europe
If we look at Europe definite articles may indeed
seem like an Indo-European phenomenon
32
Definite articles globally
blue dots definite articles (237 lgs)
but in a global perspective they are definitely ?
not!
33
LOPPU
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• Malliesimerkkejä agglutinoivista kieliryhmistä
  ovat uralilaiset ja altailaiset kielet.