Generative Approaches to Finnic and Saami Linguistics

With unusual structural characteristics, Finnish and Saami offer interesting challenges to linguistic theories formulated around more popular languages. Grammatically, for instance, languages in the Finnic and Saami group utilize extensive systems of case inflection on nouns to signal a broad variety of relations that in almost all other languages require additional words. Phonologically, as another example, the phenomenon of "consonant gradation" is of particular interest to linguists. This volume is the first to examine the phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics of Finnish and Saami languages within current generative linguistic frameworks. Collected here is research on these less-studied languages, some of which now face extinction.