Productivity of Finnish Vowel Harmony: Experimental Evidence

Finnish has a well-studied palatal harmony system whereby front and back vowels cannot co-occur in non-compound words and suffixes alternate according to the stem's harmonic class. Nevertheless, disharmonic forms exist in the language. This thesis examines the phonetic realization of vowels in harmonic and disharmonic loanwords and nonce forms created by a language game in order to establish the productivity of stem and suffix harmony. With respect to stem harmony, when words were borrowed into Finnish in the past, disharmonic stems tended to be repaired, providing evidence for the productivity of stem harmony. If stem harmony is robust, some degree of harmonization is expected in disharmonic loans and language games. While stem harmonization was observed in existent words and novel forms created by the game, the harmonization rates were lower than would be expected of a robust constraint, indicating that stem harmony is no longer fully productive, at least for some speakers. When harmonization did occur, a strength asymmetry was apparent with [+back] functioning as a stronger harmony trigger.The examination of the phonetic suffixes indicated that front suffixes were unexpectedly common with all loanword stem types. While co-articulation was a possible cause of some fronting, certain speakers, especially young females, exhibited substantial overlap in the expected front and back suffix categories. For some, this overlap was not exclusive to loanwords but was also observed with compound words. Even in the speech of speakers with discrete front and back suffix categories, front suffixes were unexpectedly frequent in the language game output and occurred even in certain cases where the stem contained no front harmonic vowels to condition the suffix. The phonetic results indicate that stem and suffix harmony in Finnish appear to be in a state of decline. The change is likely due to internal pressures which occur in Finnish and have been associated with weakening cross-linguistically. These factors include low pitch, stresslessness, and non-modal phonation. This conspiracy of phonetic factors may result in lessened prominence of the suffix vowels. Together, these internal pressures may have conspired to reduce the perceptibility of the harmonic suffix vowels, leading to the weakening of harmony.Ph.D