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Distributed for Center for the Study of Language and Information

Generative Approaches to Finnic and Saami Linguistics

With unusual structural characteristics, Finnish and Saami offer interesting challenges to linguistic theories formulated around more popular languages. Grammatically, for instance, languages in the Finnic and Saami group utilize extensive systems of case inflection on nouns to signal a broad variety of relations that in almost all other languages require additional words. Phonologically, as another example, the phenomenon of "consonant gradation" is of particular interest to linguists.

This volume is the first to examine the phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics of Finnic and Saami languages within current generative linguistic frameworks. Collected here is research on these less-studies languages, some of which now face extinction.

440 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2003

Lecture Notes

Language and Linguistics: General Language and Linguistics


Table of Contents

Contributors
1. Introduction
Satu Manninen and Diane Nelson
I. Phonology
2. Estonian Quantity: Implications for Moraic Theory
Martin Ehala
3. Opaque Consonant Gradation in Finnish - A Recourse to IO-OO Correspondence
Heli Harrikari
4. Finnish Noun Inflection
Paul Kiparsky
II. Syntax (Case)
5. A Licensing Theory for Finnish
Ash Asudeh
6. Resultatives and Depictives in Finnish
Vivienne Fong
7. Postverbal Case Realization in Finnish
Anne Vainikka
III. Syntax (Other Topics)
8. Encoding (Non)Locality in Anaphoric Relations
Elsi Kaiser
9. Finnish PPs and the Phase Impenetrability Condition
Satu Manninen
10. Counting and the Grammar: Case and Numerals in Inari Saami
Diane Nelson and Ida Toivonen
11. Constraints on the Morphological Causatives in the Tome Dialect of North Sami
Mikael Svonni and Mikael Vinka
IV. Language Change
12. The Emergence of a Definite Article in Estonian
Katrin Hiietam and Kersti Borjars
13. On the Negated Past in Finnic and Saami
Marit Julien
Language Index
Subject Index

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