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The Finnish possessive suffixes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Janet Pierrehumbert
Janet Pierrehumbert*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Abstract

A distinctive feature of Finnish morphology is the possessive suffixes, which are found not only on possessed nouns, but also on adjectives, postpositions, and untensed verbs. Traditional grammars have taken the view that these suffixes arise through a rule of agreement with a genitive specifier, which may be subject to subsequent deletion rules. This paper shows that they are not agreement markers, but rather clitic allomorphs of the reflexive pronoun. X-bar theory is used to formulate rules governing their distribution.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , September 1980 , pp. 603 - 621
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 by Linguistic Society of America

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