Finnish morphosyntax

This is one of many documents describing linguistic aspects of omorfi’s morphological analysis part. I have written it as an FAQ related to common discussions about certain tags or word-forms in omorfi analyses. It is meant to complement the more computational / hacker documentation in this site. Other references you might find interesting include ISO suomen kielioppi, verkkoversion “Finnish reference grammar” and Universal dependencies for Finnish, which are two facets of the omorfi’s linguistic analysis form. However, omorfi’s analyses are meant to be inclusive for all applications and traditions of analysing language, so while this document argues for certain options, there will be analysers with different versions in omorfi’s source tree for most of the things (added on as-needed basis).

Lemma form?

In morphological analyses, it is customary to identify the word somehow, with a lemma, a dictionary form, an id number (e.g. in wordnet?) or such. Omorfi by default uses a word id to denote a word-form that is in the lexical database. > talon [WORD_ID=talo][POS=NOUN][NUM=SG][CASE=GEN] > mies [WORD_ID=mies][POS=NOUN][NUM=SG][CASE=NOM] > talonmies [WORD_ID=talonmies][POS=NOUN][NUM=SG][CASE=NOM] [WORD_ID=talo][POS=NOUN][NUM=SG][CASE=GEN][BOUNDARY=COMPOUND][WORD_ID=mies][POS=NOUN][NUM=SG][CASE=NOM]

This will tell us that all three words are in the dictionary: talo “house”, mies (man) and talonmies (janitor), as well as the fact that the compound is made of just talo+mies (man of the house).

For some applications it is detrimental to know how word is formed and that it is in the database, those will not use word id’s, but hypothetical lemma.

> talonmies
talon#mies N Nom Sg
talon#mies N Nom Sg

I (flammie) find this more problematic, for one, there’s no information left of what talon is anymore, could be Engl. ‘talon’ for all we know.

Adverb or adposition

Adverbs and adpositions are quite heterogeneous set of words altogether. The main difference in syntax is that adpositions will have nominal complements, adverbs may have verb, adjective, adverb or even sentence complements, or no clear complements at all. Adpositions’ complements are typically genitives or partitives, often found nearby, but not necessarily. Adpositions’ complements may be encoded with possessive suffix attached to adposition itself. Adverbs typically would not have possessive suffixes, but some actually do.

Participle or derivation

Participles are verb forms, that become derivations when they turn into adjectives. A participle is a participle if it is part of a verb chain, phrase or structure, that cannot be replaced with an adjective, e.g., syntactic tense or such construction. A participle can also be a past connegative form, dependent of negation verb. While participle can only appear in singular and plural, the derived adjective can appear in all case and comparative forms.

Infinitive or derivation

The three basic infinitives, i.e. first to third infinitive, or A, E, and MA infinitives, do not have derivational use, they cannot replace nouns in syntactic construction. While some grammars have taken the stance that previously fourth infinitive is only a noun derivation, it retains some use that cannot syntactically be replaced by any non-verbal noun, specifically as a complement of negated equative clause. It would be quite difficult indeed to syntactically analyse such structure without an infinitive reading.

Particle?

The word particle has had different uses in different grammars of Finnish, none of them particularly well-defined. The current grammar will use it as a catch-all class for non-major parts-of-speech. This reading can be used in some versions of omorfi as well. In universal parts-of-speech scheme, particle is not used for Finnish and that practice has been followed in omorfi UPOS readings as well.

Omorfi Open morphology for Finnish