Antti Arppe
Department of General Linguistics, University of Helsinki
Siltavuorenpenger 20 A, PL 9
FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
antti.arppe@ling.helsinki.fi 

Focal points in frequency profiles – how some word forms in a paradigm are more significant than others in Finnish

Abstract
Karlsson (1985, 1986) has argued that different noun lexemes in Finnish prefer different inflectional forms and features, designated as focal points, on the basis of their basic meanings. Furthermore, he suggests that lexemes form groups according to such inflectional preferences. The purpose of this paper is to observe how uniform are the inflectional profiles and the corresponding focal points within groups in the case of a selection of lexemes representing two basic meaning groups: nouns that can be used to denote substance or time. Using correspondence analysis it is shown that within each group there is considerable variation in the associations of lexemes and inflectional forms. In the case of the nouns denoting time, there appear to be several clusters of words with similar inflectional associations. In the case of nouns denoting a substance, clustering within the group is less clear. Nevertheless, Karlsson’s arguments can be supported, though finer groupings than the ones used in this paper seem necessary.
Keywords: lexical semantics, inflectional paradigms, Finnish, correspondence analysis

1. Introduction and background
Karlsson has argued that different noun lexemes in Finnish prefer different inflectional forms and features on the basis of their basic meanings (Karlsson 1985, 1986). The purpose of this paper is to observe how uniform are the inflectional profiles within groups in the case of two basic meaning groups: (1) nouns that can be used to denote substance, and (2) nouns that can be used to denote time.

As Finnish is a morphologically rich language, its nouns, verbs and adjectives can theoretically have different (inflected) word forms in the thousands. Generally given figures for the number of inflected forms that one can possibly construct in Finnish are just over 1,850 for a noun, well over 6,000 for an adjective, and approximately 20,000 for a verb (depending on whether one counts in the five participle form sets or not). Though such inflectional paradigms can be viewed as both full and their individual members as equal according to some earlier views (by H. Seiler, P. H. Matthews, A. Carstairs and M. Aronoff, given by Karlsson 1985: 137), Karlsson (1985: 151) has argued to the contrary that a paradigm should rather be viewed as a gradient continuum. Thus, instead of a two-way division into forms that can and do exist and forms that cannot exist, one should see the paradigm as a profile representing the relative frequencies of its members. These relative frequencies are on their own turn determined as a function of (morpho-)syntactic and semantic properties of the root lexeme (ibidem 1985: 149-150; 1986: 23), via the respective semantic and syntactic roles they are used in. In such a profile, the most frequently used forms, which he terms as focal forms, (ibidem 1986: 23) are at one end, and the fully deficient forms at the other, with the remaining forms falling in between these two extremes according to their respective relative frequency.
 
Karlsson (1986: 20-23) suggests that these profiles need not be fully different and specific for each individual lexeme, but that there are instead some general types, which are determined by the “basic” meanings of the root lexemes. Thus, in the case of Finnish nouns according to Karlsson, lexemes denoting human agents have as their focal forms the nominative and genitive cases, country names the genitive and internal local cases (inessive, elative and illative), mass nouns the partitive and internal local cases, and temporal nouns the general local cases (essive and translative) or the genitive, respectively. However, Karlsson observed in the two studies altogether only a handful of nouns (and pronouns) with quite prototypical basic meanings, namely hän ‘he/she’, Martti ~‘Martin’, Helsinki ‘Helsinki’, vesi ‘water’, alue ‘area’, and kesä ‘summer’ in the latter study (1986), and 4–10 nouns per basic meaning group in the former study (1985). Firstly, one can very well ask whether the inflectional profiles observed by Karlsson, however sensible they may seem, represent only the lexemes in question or the suggested groups as a whole. Secondly, individual (base form) lexemes needn't have a single basic meaning, and furthermore, the basic meaning and its semantic role (in the Fillmorean sense) may vary according to context. Take for instance the use of rock in the locative role of a natural object in ‘stand on a rock’, in the patient/instrumental role of a natural object in ‘throw a rock’, and the patient/instrumental role of a (natural) substance in ‘made of solid rock’.

2. Research methods and material
The classification of basic meaning groups used in this paper is based on the listing of primitive semantic components or unique beginners for nouns in the WordNet lexical database described and implemented for English by Miller (1990) and others. Thus, nouns denoting substance and time correspond to mass nouns and temporal nouns, respectively, used by Karlsson. From a corpus of some two million words of newspaper text from the Finnish daily Keskisuomalainen, 25 mass nouns and 31 temporal nouns were chosen, starting from the top of the noun frequency list. All the inflected forms of these words were extracted from the same corpus, after the corpus had been automatically morphologically analysed and disambiguated. Only the case and number tags were used of the full morphological analyses. Correspondence analysis, an established method in statistics, was then used for the analysis and visualization of the similarities and differences of the inflectional profiles within the noun groups.

3. Results
The results of the correspondence analysis of the 25 mass nouns and the 31 temporal nouns, and their case and number inflectional tags are presented in Figures 1 and 2 respectively. The cases are abbreviated with the first three capital letters of their names (nominative  NOM), with the exception of partitive (PTV). In the case of number, singular is abbreviated with (SG) and plural with (PL). In Figure 1, the surface syntactic analyses denoting usage as either an attribute (&A) or a nominal head  (&NH) are also included. In order to facilitate the interpretation of both Figures for non-Finnish-speaking readers, the original Finnish base form lexemes have been translated into English. In the discussion section of this paper below, however, the original lexemes will be given alongside the English translations. If some obviously semantically similar lexemes have practically the same position on the graph, so that it becomes illegible, only one of such lexemes is selected to represent the others. 

Figure 1: Correspondence analysis of the 25 most common nouns with a potential denotation of a substance in Finnish (axes C1-C2)

Figure 2: Correspondence analysis of the 31 most common nouns with a potential denotation of time in Finnish (axes C1-C2)
4. Interpretation and discussion
In the case of the mass nouns, the C1-axis, representing 42% of the variance, appears to arrange the lexemes to those that can be used in or prefer the plural form, first and foremost huume  ‘drug’, lääke ‘medicine’, and aine ‘stuff/substance’, and those that do not, i.e. all the other lexemes. There is also a weaker distinction along the C2-axis, representing 20% of the variance, casting lexemes with an association with most of the grammatical cases, i.e., translative, partitive and genetive, at the upper end, and lexemes with an association with the outer and inner locative cases, i.e. ablative, allative, adessive, inessive and illative at the lower end. To the former group of lexemes along the C2-axis belong olut ‘beer’, sähkö ‘electricity’, energia ‘energy’, liha ‘meat’, puu ‘wood’, omaisuus ‘property’ and ruoka ‘food’, which represent different foodstuffs and intangible substances, and they indeed seem to behave according to Karlsson’s expectations. To the latter group of lexemes along the C2-axis belong jää ‘ice’, ilma ‘air’, which can be interpreted both as substances and as natural locations, and tuli ‘fire’ and tuuli ‘wind’, forces of nature with a continuous and non-delineable character. Used in the external locative cases, these lexemes can be interpreted as surface locations, e.g. jäällä ‘on top of the [sea/lake/river] ice’, jäältä ‘from [the surface of] the ice’, and jäälle ‘onto the ice’, or as tangible or intangible substances used as instruments, e.g. jäällä ‘with ice’ or tulella ‘with fire’. Furthermore, the third axis (C3) not shown here, representing 14% of the variance, would separate two of the inner locative cases, inessive and illative, from the rest, and associate these with maa ‘earth/soil/country’ and ilma. This would underline a stronger locative usage of these two lexemes, e.g. ilmassa ‘in the air’ and ilmaan ‘into the air’, as compared with the rest. Thus, most of the mass nouns in this sample seem to be “detached” from the internal locative cases, contrary to Karlsson’s expectation, but one must note here that the lexemes have not been semantically disambiguated, so the results may also represent usage in some other senses.

In the case of the temporal nouns, there appears to be a major distinction between the usage of the inessive and essive cases, placed at the opposite ends of the C1-axis, representing 42% of the variance. As Figure 2 shows, the former case is very much associated with months, e.g. joulukuussa ‘in December’, the latter with weekdays, e.g. sunnuntaina ‘on Sunday’. There were other month and day names in the data, but they were situated in the original graph on top of each other, and were thus left out for reasons of legibility; this categorical association could distort the results on the part of the other lexemes. Furthermore, these two associations together seem to be opposed with an association with the adessive case, typically used in the sense ‘at a particular time’, along the C2-axis, representing 20% of the variance. The adessive case seems to attract lexemes such as hetki ‘moment’, aamu ‘aamu’, vuosikymmen ‘decade’, kausi ‘period’, ilta ‘eve[ning]’ and viikko ‘week’, which vary considerably in duration, so much so that it is difficult to see a unifying factor. On the other hand, it can be seen that two semantically natural subgroups have very similar inflectional profiles, as they both form two distinguishable clusters in Figure 2, namely the seasons, i.e. talvi ‘winter’, kevät ‘spring’, syksy ‘fall’ and kesä ‘summer’, and the quantitative measurements of time, i.e. tunti ‘hour’, minuutti ‘minute’ and sekunti ‘second’. The third axis (C3) not shown here, representing 15% of the variance, distinguishes between the translative case, which can be used in the temporal sense as ‘by some particular time’ or ‘for some exact time’, e.g. aamuksi ‘by morning’ or hetkeksi ‘for a moment’, and the inessive and illative cases, with a temporal interpretation of ‘within/in a particular duration of time’ or ‘for a particular duration of time’, e.g. vuosikymmenessä ‘within a decade’ or tuntiin ‘for an hour’, respectively. These results seem to indicate that nouns denoting time have several subclasses with different focal points, based on their basic meaning or membership in a particular closed category, instead of the single one provided by Karlsson.

5. Conclusions and suggestions for further research
In conclusion, it seems that there is considerable variation within the group of temporal nouns as far as concerns their inflectional profiles, though this variation shows some clear clustering in the case of closed classes, e.g. seasons, weekdays, months, and quantitative measurements of time. The mass nouns, on their part, also exhibit variation, but this does not seem to lead to clearly distinguishable subgroups. In their case, the usage of the same mass nouns in non-substance senses may very well reflect on the results, which is an issue that should addressed in further research. In the end, the results would seem to support Karlsson’s notion of inflectional profile types with differing focal points, but they also indicate that one needs finer groupings than those which are used in this paper.

REFERENCES
Karlsson, Fred 1985. Paradigms and Word Forms. Studia gramatyczne VII. Ossolineum 1985, pp. 135-154.
Karlsson, Fred 1986. Frequency Considerations in Morphology. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung. Berlin 39/1, pp. 19-28.
Miller, George A. 1990. Nouns in WordNet: A Lexical Inheritance System. In: International Journal of Lexicography 3 (4), 1990, pp. 245 - 264. Extracted from: <ftp://ftp.cogsci.princeton.edu/pub/wordnet/5papers.ps> (Revised August 1993)