Variation in Finnish phonology and morphology

Abstract

In (1a), (1d) and (1f) the weak variant is obligatory; in (1b), (1c) and (1e) either variant is possible. No lexical conditioning is involved. The key observation is that the strong variant creates a heavy penult, while the weak variant creates a light penult. This weight difference interacts with word prosody in ways that make the choice completely predictable from stress. The core generalizations concerning Finnish stress are as follows (Sadeniemi, 1949; Carlson, 1978): (a) Primary stress falls on the initial syllable; (b) Secondary stress falls on every second syllable after the initial one, skipping a light syllable if the syllable after that is heavy, unless that heavy syllable is ®nal; (c) Adjacent syllables within a word are never stressed. In addition, ®nal syllables may be optionally stressed if heavy, subject to (a)±(c). Assuming the idealization that ®nal syllables are never stressed (but see Anttila & Cho, 1998), the distribution of the variants in CV-®nal stems is simple to state: