Transcript The West European profile

How exotic is Finnish?
Östen Dahl
The received view
• Genealogically, Finnish belongs to the
Uralic languages
• Typologically, Uralic (and also Altaic)
languages differ radically from IndoEuropean languages by being
agglutinative rather than flectional/fusional
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
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
Finnish 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
Languages typologically closest to Finnish
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
Classical 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 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)
• 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?
Finnish
Nominative
Illative sg
Illative pl
vesi
veteen
vesiin
Swedish
hund-ar-na-s
svans-ar
dog-PL-DEF-GEN
tail-PL
’the dogs’ tails were docked’
‘water’
kupera-de-s
dock-PST-PASS
It is not so difficult to find Finnish examples
that look fusional and Swedish examples that
look agglutinative
Bell curve parameters
• Typological parameters are continua rather than
dichotomies
• Typological distributions tend to be ”normal Bell
curves” rather than ”inverted Bell curves”
Inflectional synthesis of the verb
60
50
40
30
20
2-3
4-5 6-7
8-9
10
0
1011
0-1
CountOfFEAT_VALUE
1213
Finnish does not seem to have very complex verb
morphology!
Number of finite forms in Finnish and
French
• Finnish
–
–
–
–
present
past
conditional
(potential)
Indeed, Finnish has
fewer finite verb
forms than e.g.
French
• French (written)
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
présent ind.
présent subj.
imparfait ind.
imparfait subj.
passé simple
futur
conditionnel
Number of case forms (WALS)
100
90
80
70
The richness of the
Finnish case
system is quite
unusual
typologically
60
50
40
30
4-5
no
case
6-7
20
10
0
8-9
2
3
4
6-7
5
8-9
CountOfFEAT_VALUE
101011
12-13
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
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)
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
OV/VO vs. PostP/PreP
Continental
Asia: mainly
OV and
postpositions
Europe:
mainly VO
and
prepositions
Indo-European word order
The border between
VO/PreP and
OV/PostP cuts
straight through the IE
languages
Uralic word order
Uralic languages are all postpositional (or
almost), but western Uralic languages are VO
rather than OV
Harmonic vs. disharmonic types
The disharmonic
combination of VO and
postpositions is found in a
”buffer zone” between the
harmonic options
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?
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
Distribution of some ”European”
features
Finnish as a European language
• Finnish is not quite a ”Standard Average
European” (SAE) language…
• …but comes fairly close to it
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
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
Expression of non-lexical subjects
Finnish:
”mixed”
Majority option
(61%) :
subject affixes
on verbs
Minority option
(11%):
obligatory
subject
pronouns
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’
Predicative 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
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 Europe
If we look at
Europe definite
articles may
indeed seem like
an IndoEuropean
phenomenon…
Definite articles globally
but in a global perspective they
are definitely  not!
blue dots – definite
articles (237 lgs)
LOPPU
• ”Malliesimerkkejä agglutinoivista
kieliryhmistä ovat uralilaiset ja altailaiset
kielet. ”