Morfologinen diffuusio

• Aila Mielikäinen

Avainsanat: diffuusio, morfologia, murteentutkimus, äännehistoria

Abstrakti

Morphological diffusion (englanti)

1995 (99)

Aila Mielikinen (University of Jyvskyl; fi)

Morphological diffusion

Finnish dialectology mostly deals with the history of sound changes; it is diachronic research which investigates sound changes according to neogrammarian principles. Because inflection and derivation are such central processes in Finnish grammar, dialectologists have often had recourse to the concept of analogy, and morphology has also had a place in historical descriptions of Finnish dialects. Labovian sociolinguistics and more recent approaches in variation analysis (such as the dynamic model, wave theory) have brought many new methods and modes of description into the study of modern dialects. One of these is the concept of lexical diffusion, which allows us to follow the gradual spread of changes from word to word, from morpheme to morpheme. In analytic languages such as English, words and morphemes often coincide, but in Finnish, an agglutinative language, lexemes must be distinguished from word-forms, and also from morphemes. Among morphemes, a distinction must be made between stem and bound morphemes, suffixes. Since many sound changes in Finnish are conditioned on morphological categories, the diffusion of changes in Finnish must also be studied from one form to another, i.e. literally from morpheme to morpheme. In this sense we can talk of morphological diffusion. Morphological diffusion may take place within the same paradigm from one case-form or person-form to another. For instance, this is what has happened to the irregular short variants of the first and second singular personal pronouns m(), s() : mu-, su-, which in dialects and the contemporary spoken language are most common in external locative cases (mulla, multa, mulle), and least common in internal locative cases (mussa, musta, muhun). The direction of diffusion has thus been external locatives nominative, genitive, accusative, partitive internal locatives. A change may also spread between quite different morphological categories, even between the inflected and the derivative forms of nominals and verbs. This has happened in the assimilation of the combination ea, e (korkea > korkeehigh): the change has occurred first in nominals, then in partitive singular forms and in the 1st infinitive: korkee sormee finger, lhtee leave. Morphological diffusion does not explain the origin of a linguistic change, but it does describe how a change spreads. It is particularly appropriate to Finnish, and has three advantages. First, morphology combines the phonological and syntactic levels of language, so that morphological diffusion may reveal the connections of sound changes even as far as syntax. Only after a morphological analysis can one examine lexical diffusion. Second, morphological diffusion can be applied to the analysis of language-forms from different periods, both older rural dialects and contemporary speech, and it complements other research methods used in dialectology and sociolinguistics. Third, this mode of description is appropriate for all types of changes, provided that they have morphological manifestations. The concept of morphological diffusion makes it possible to give equal treatment to sound changes and analogies in regional dialects, to innovations loaned from the standard language and regional dialects into modern spoken Finnish, and even to irregularities which have often been ignored in traditional studies of dialects.