JOURNAL LINGUISTICS

Jussi Niemi

Paradigm Competition:

An Experimental Note on Finnish Verbs

ABSTRACT

In languages with a high number of inflectional paradigms, morphological forms may interact across paradigms irrespective of stringent paradigm-defining properties such as phonological shape.  A contracted verb sometime gives overwhelming effect among the verbs of this language. This override effect is not fortuitous, since it can be explained, e.g., with the relative lack of phonological alternation in affixation. In this respect, Finnish appears to favor agglutination, although in some other areas the language shows developmental traits towards increasing fusionality.

INTRODUCTION

The present study shows that Finnish verb inflection, involves a complex bundle of forms containing transparent morpho(phono)logy and competition of closely-related paradigms. In addition to competing stem and affixal allomorphy, the assumed processing load in Finnish verb inflection is enhanced still as we observe that (i) in language production and reception the morphological operator(s) of Finnish speakers must be highly active since about half of the words carry a non-zero inflectional marker in spoken language, and in written text, the proportion is higher still, as about 77 per cent of running words contain a non-zero inflectional marker. As specifically for verbs, they lack a morphologically simplex form.

METHOD

2.1 Subjects and Data

48 monolingual Finnish-speaking 13–14-year-old schoolchildren were

group-tested in the present experiment. 80 pseudoverbs were created by

changing the consonant onset of real verbs. The pseudoverbs represented four paradigms:

1.      Oi-dA paradigm with multisyllabic stems.

Here the stem-final Oi- sequence is an unambiguous paradigm assigner.

2.      contracted verb paradigm.

carries, inter alia, suffixal agglutination with concomitant grade alternation of the steminternal stop consonants in the present and past tenses.

3.      Antaa .

4.      ottaa paradigms.

2.2 Procedures

The written-form experiment carried 80 (4 x 20) multi-sentence test-items constructed in the following manner (below with approximate English translations). The subjects’ task was to fill in the cloze slots, in writing, with the appropriate morphosyntactic form of the pseudoverb given in the infinitive form of the first sentence.

3. RESULT

In spite of the unambiguous transparency of paradigm membership of the pseudoverbs the overall error rate is as high as 47.0%.The response pattern shows that the Oi-dA paradigm is as expected extremely robust to any inter-paradigmatic effects. the antaa and ottaa paradigms obtain the lowest scores, with about 12–14 % correctness rates. The most significant attractor is the contracted verb paradigm, since the shifts away from the antaa and ottaa types heavily concentrate on this paradigm with circa 85% attraction rates.

CONCLUSION

It can be concludes that the present meta linguistic, off-line data show that contracted verbs (a) are resistant to error, and (b) that this paradigm attracts items from the neighboring antaa and ottaa paradigms. One of the reasons for this state of affairs is it is here claimed due to their semiotically relatively expedient affixation. It should be stressed in this connection that also in the case of nouns the more agglutinative paradigms are the invading ones in Finnish. Finally, the negation form in this paradigm (like hakkaa) is homophonous with the 3sg., which has been claimed to be one of the cognitive “base forms” of the Finnish verb.

COMMENT

This paper explain to us that in a high number of inflectional paradigms, morphological forms may interact across paradigms irrespective of stringent paradigm defining properties such as phonological shape. This paper focus to the an experimental note in Finnish verb and the connection that also in the case of nouns the more agglutinative paradigms are the invading ones in Finnish.