Liitepartikkelien vokaalisointusuhteista suomen murteissa

• Petri Lauerma

Avainsanat: fonologia, liitepartikkelit, liivi, murteentutkimus, vokaalisointu

Abstrakti

Non-harmonic enclitic particles in Finnish dialects (englanti)

1996 (100)

Petri Lauerma

NON-HARMONIC ENCLITIC PARTICLES IN FINNISH DIALECTS

This article is concerned with a detail of the Finnish vowel harmony system. In general the front harmonizing vowels y cannot occur with the back harmonizing vowels a o u in the same non-compound word with the exception of some late loan words. The front vowels e and i are harmonically neutral in that they can occur with both front and back vowels within a word. The harmonic shape of suffixes is determined by the last non-neutral vowel of the word stem. When a stem has only neutral vowels, suffixes are front vocalic. Due to the relatively young age of the front labial vowels, there are many derivatives where e and i have combined with the back labial vowels o and u instead of the front and y. Productive suffixes such as case endings, markers and enclitic particles are, however, always front vocalic after stems containing only neutral vowels. Although vowel harmony is well preserved in most Finnish dialects with the exception of certain dialects of the Far North spoken in Sweden and Norway, the material collected from the Morphology Archives (MA), the Syntax Archives (LA) and the Lexical Archives of Finnish Dialects (SMSA) shows that non-harmonic enclitic particles kO, pA and hAn occur in many dialects.

Non-harmonic kO -enclitics (e.g. eiko 'doesn't', tmko 'this one?') are not uncommon in the SW and Hme dialects and they are also found in the SE dialects and in some dialects of the Far North (see map 1). Non-harmonic pA -enclitics (e.g. sepa 'especially this one') are much rarer. They are occasionally found mainly in the narrow area from the SW dialects through to the SE Hme dialects (see map 2). With both these enclitics harmony is violated by the appearance of back vocalic enclitics after front vocalic word stems. On the other hand, non-harmonic hAn -enclitics, which are found here and there in the SW, Hme, SE and Far North dialects (see map 3), can be both back and front vocalic (e.g. joshn 'if', niihan 'so it is'). Neutral vocalic forms like eiko, sepa and niihan (symbolized in the maps by circles) are frequent, but forms from stems with front harmonizing vowels, such as tmko (symbolized by squares in maps 12) are found mainly only in the dialects of the Pori region, Lower Satakunta and SE Hme as well as in some of their adjacent regions.

Enclitic particles are grammatically more independent than other suffixes: they are on the borderline between independent (full) words and bound suffixes, making it more likely for them to be unaffected by vowel harmony. The well known history of these particles is also relevant: enclitic hAn has developed from the sg. 3. person pronoun hn 'he, she', the back vocality of the enclitic ko reflects the late origin of the vowel in non-initial syllables, and enclitic pA may originally be a loan from the Baltic languages. Non-harmonic behaviour is most frequent when enclitic particles are followed by a word which either belongs to the same harmonic class as the enclitic particle violating the harmony or is at least neutral vocalic. However, most instances of non-harmonic enclitics in Finnish dialects violate harmony conditions less than would be expected, because they are usually formed from word stems with neutral vowels only. This may be due to a tendency to keep the phonotactics of word stems similar to that of the forms suffixated from them. Moreover, in most dialects neutral vocalic instances of the enclitics seem to be more or less lexicalized, being formed from a restricted group of word stems, such as the negative verb or a pronominal stem.