How exotic is Finnish?How exotic is Finnish?

Östen Dahl

The received viewThe 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

Testing the received viewTesting the received view on data from WALS 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

What the received view predictsWhat 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

Finnish and Hungarian do not clusterFinnish and Hungarian do not cluster

• 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

Languages typologically closest to Finnish

Classical morphological typologyClassical morphological typology

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

Agglutinative languages (Wikipedia)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.

Fusional languages (Wikipedia)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.

Which language is agglutinative?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

Bell curve parametersBell curve parameters

• Typological parameters are continua rather than dichotomies

• Typological distributions tend to be ”normal Bell curves” rather than ”inverted Bell curves”

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

CountOfFEAT_VALUE

0-1

4-52-3 8-96-7

10-11

12-13

Inflectional synthesis of the verbInflectional synthesis of the verb

Finnish does not seem to have very complex verb morphology!

Number of finite forms in Finnish and Number of finite forms in Finnish and FrenchFrench

• 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

4-5

8-96-7 10-11

12-13

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

CountOfFEAT_VALUE

no case

23 4 5

6-7

8-910-

Number of case forms (WALS)Number of case forms (WALS)

The richness of the Finnish case

system is quite unusual

typologically

Finnish as an agglutinative languageFinnish 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

The Finnish case systemThe 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)

Importance of areal influenceImportance 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

OV/VO vs. PostP/PrePOV/VO vs. PostP/PreP

Europe: mainly VO

and prepositions

Continental Asia: mainly

OV and postpositions

Indo-European word orderIndo-European word order

The border between VO/PreP and OV/PostP cuts straight through the IE languages

Uralic word orderUralic word order

Uralic languages are all postpositional (or almost), but western Uralic languages are VO rather than OV

Harmonic vs. disharmonic typesHarmonic vs. disharmonic types

The disharmonic combination of VO and

postpositions is found in a ”buffer zone” between the

harmonic options

The West European profileThe 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?

Features that areFeatures that are over-represented in western Europe 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

Distribution of some ”European” Distribution of some ”European” featuresfeatures

Finnish as a European languageFinnish as a European language

• Finnish is not quite a ”Standard Average European” (SAE) language…

• …but comes fairly close to it

Euronormativity makes Finnish seem Euronormativity makes Finnish seem uniqueunique

• 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

Sometimes it is SAE that is exoticSometimes 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

Expression of non-lexical subjectsExpression of non-lexical subjects

Majority option (61%) :

subject affixes on verbs

Minority option (11%):

obligatory subject

pronouns

Finnish: ”mixed”

Everything may be equally exoticEverything 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’

Predicative possessionPredicative possession

In Stassen’s sample,

’have’ is the most

common option but

still a minority one

The locational option is almost equally common

Is definiteness an Indo-European Is definiteness an Indo-European phenomenon?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”

Definite articles in EuropeDefinite articles in EuropeIf we look at Europe definite articles may indeed seem like an Indo-European phenomenon…

Definite articles globallyDefinite articles globally

blue dots – definite articles (237 lgs)

but in a global perspective they are definitely not!

LOPPULOPPU

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