Full Title: SLE workshop on marginal phonemes
Short Title: SLE WS MPh

Date: 21-Aug-2024 - 24-Aug-2024
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact Person: László Fejes
Meeting Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics; Phonology

Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2023

Meeting Description:

The 57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea will be held 21–24 August 2024 in Helsinki, and it gives a great opportunity for bringing together linguists engaged in marginal phonemes occurring or being contrastive only in some subsets of the lexicon (foreign words, onomatopoeia) or in a restricted phonological or morphological context.

Call for Papers:

Finnish is rich in marginal phonemes.
Traditionally, there were no voiced obstruents in Finnish, and they do not occur in native Finnish words. The only exception is /d/, which occurs word internally in Standard Finnish (and corresponds to various phonemes or nothing in the dialects). Standard Finnish /d/ occurs only in the weak grade of morphemes with consonant gradation (CG, e.g. /kɑtu/ ‘street.NOM.SG’ : /kɑdu-n/ ‘street-GEN.SG’). Its current standard pronunciation as a plosive is due to the pronunciation of the elite with a Swedish language background.
Additionally, /d/, similarly to /b/ and /ɡ/, also occurs in non-native words, even in word-initial position. Although alveolar consonants (in contrast to almost all other consonants) are allowed word-finally, /d/ never occurs there. In contrast to /d/, /b/ and /ɡ/ also occurs in geminates, and also participate in CG (/mobɑ-tɑʔ/ ‘mob-INF’ : /mobːɑː-n/ ‘mob-PRS.1SG’). However, Finnish speakers tend to substitute [b] and [ɡ] with [p] and [k], respectively.
Similarly to /d/, /ŋ/ also occurs only word-internally due to CG. It also occurs as an allophone of /n/ before /k/, and the cluster /nk/ alternates with /ŋː/ in CG: /helsinki/ [helsiŋki] ‘Helsinki.NOM.SG’ : /helsiŋːi-n/ ‘Helsinki-GEN.SG’. Short [ŋ] occurs only as the first element of clusters even in recent loanwords (e.g. /piŋʋini/ ‘penguin’).
The voiceless fricative /f/ also only occurs in non-native words and also word-initially (/filmi/ ‘film, movie’, /flikːɑ/ ‘girl’). It also occurs as a geminate, but does not participate in alternations due to CG: /lefːɑ/ ‘movie.NOM.SG’ /lefːɑ-n/ (*/lefɑ-n/) ‘movie-GEN.SG’. Some speakers tend to substitute word-initial /f/s with /v/ (/fiksu/ ~ /viksu/ ‘clever’) or /p/ (/plikːɑ/ ‘girl’) or to delete it from clusters (/likːɑ/ ‘girl’). Intervocalic /f/ is substituted by the cluster /hʋ/ is earlier loanwords (/kɑhʋi/ ‘coffee’), or by dialect speakers even in more recent loans (/ohʋi/ ‘Off! (brand)’).
Postalveolar sibilants also occur only in foreign words, and many times they are pronounced as alveolars: /ʃɑkːi/ ~ /sɑkːi/ ‘chess’ (the latter form also means ‘crowd, gang’). Voiced /ʒ/ is even more rare, and even in foreign words it usually occurs in a cluster with /d/ (/dʒonkːi/ ‘junk’, /mɑhɑrɑdʒɑ/ ‘maharaja’), and only occasionally as a single consonant (/ʒiguli/ ‘Zhiguli’) – and it can be both devoiced and pronounced as an alveolar.
Finnish also has a marginal phoneme /ʔ/, which only occurs morpheme-finally, is the only consonant which, in addition to the alveolar ones, occurs also word-finally. Even there it is usually assimilated by the following consonant, even across word boundaries, resulting in a geminate. Many morphophonological alternations can be explained purely as phonological alternations if we consider the presence of /ʔ/.
Nonetheless, the phonemic status of some of these elements are ignored or denied by most of the descriptions of Finnish. Despite the widely known and often cited principle, “once a phoneme – always a phoneme”, descriptions of various languages often ignore or deny the phonemic status of units which are contrastive only in a restricted set of environments.
As the 57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea will be held 21–24 August 2024 in Helsinki, it gives a great opportunity for bringing together linguists engaged in marginal phonemes. We welcome any abstracts (ca. 300 words) concerning marginal morphemes, occurring or being contrastive only in some subsets of the lexicon (foreign words, onomatopoeia) or in a restricted phonological or morphological context. We invite papers both with descriptive or theoretical orientation, approaching the topic either from a synchronic, historical, dialectological, psycho- or sociolinguistic perspective.
The abstracts should be sent to the organisers Jack Rueter ([email protected]) and László Fejes ([email protected]).