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 • Let’s look at the 222 best represented languages in WALS

5. Most of the languages typologically closest to Finnish are in fact Indo-European Turkish and Hungarian are ranked after these Finnish and Hungarian do not cluster Languages typologically closest to Finnish

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 2-3 4-5 6-7 8-9 12-13 10-11 0-1 Finnish does not seem to have very complex verb morphology!

12. Finnish present past conditional (potential) French (written) présent ind. présent subj. imparfait ind. imparfait subj. passé simple futur conditionnel Number of finite forms in Finnish and French Indeed, Finnish has fewer finite verb forms than e.g. French

13. 12-13 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 agglutinative:fusional 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 Tamm’s 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 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 Stassen’s 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 but in a global perspective they are definitely  not! blue dots – definite articles (237 lgs)

33. LOPPU

34. ”Malliesimerkkejä agglutinoivista kieliryhmistä ovat uralilaiset ja altailaiset kielet. ”