Nominien paradigmaattistuminen suomessa. Millä rakenteellisilla ehdoilla kielenkäyttäjät sitovat potentiaaliset nominit taivutusluokkiin?

• Alexandre Nikolaev
• Jussi Niemi

Avainsanat: frekvenssi, korpuslingvistiikka, potentiaaliset nominit, skeema-analogia, taivutus

Abstrakti

Paradigmatisation of nouns in Finnish: How do speakers structurally associate potential nouns with particular inflectional categories? (englanti)

1/2006 (110)

Paradigmatisation of Nouns in Finnish

How do speakers structurally associate potential nouns with particular inflectional categories?

The Wug Test, in which linguistically naive speakers are required to inflect non-words, or pseudowords, has been used extensively in studies of inflectional morphology since the classic study by Jean Berko (1958). One motivation for the use of pseudowords is to avoid the potential effects of intervening lexical-semantic variables, which can arise when using real words.

The main aim of the study was to test the significance of a set of sub-lexical segments in the decisions made by speakers who were required to place a potential s-final Finnish noun in a specific paradigm. In these pseudoword tasks, which are based on the writers analysis of corpus data, the phonological structure is manipulated by systematically changing various segments, and the strength of the link between the pseudoword and the underlying real word is tested. This wug task is preceded by two analyses: an analysis of the surface frequency of Finnish s-final nouns, and an analysis of the lemma frequency of the target paradigms and its effect on the processing of lexical items in these paradigms.

The results show that pseudowords are affected by the underlying real lexical items. The writers claim that the reason for this is not semantic but instead probably reflects formal associations. More specifically, the results indicate that if the pseudoword carries a prototypical (thematic) segment of an inflectional paradigm (e.g. final -as/s in the patsas paradigm), this segment will have a considerable influence on the assignment of the pseudoword to a specific paradigm.

Alexandre Nikolaev Jussi Niemi