¹ I wish to thank Jaap Mey of the University of Copenhagen for his stimulating correspondence on this subject; Eric Hamp of the University of Chicago for his many suggestions for improving this paper; and my wife Sirpa, my principal informant.

² E. N. Setälä, Suomen kielioppi ¹⁴ [Finnish grammar] 78.4 (Helsinki, 1948). I have given only the essential features of Setälä's analysis and have used my own examples.

³ I have substituted the stem talli- ‘stable’ for Setälä's pappi- 'priest' in order to avoid reference to the so-called consonant gradation (astevaihtelu), which is not involved in the problems under consideration here. Any final descriptive statement of the Finnish genitive plural, however, must account for this phenomenon also. Compare nominative singular pappi, genitive singular papin, genitive plural pappien, pappein, and instructive plural papein.

⁴ -den and -tten usually vary with the speaker. For simplicity I use only -den. (See §3.1.)

⁵ My main informants were students at the University of Helsinki ; most of them were from the province of Häme. I have excluded the speech of those who had done advanced work on the Finnish language.

⁶ Similar patterns, but with different conclusions drawn, have been pointed out by R. E. Nirvi, Voidaanko monikon genetiivin monimuotoisuutta supistaa? [Is it possible to reduce the complexity of the genitive plural?], Virittäjä 49.477–89 (1945).

⁷ Some nominal s have more than one consonant stem, but only one of these is used with the genitive plural; e.g. toinen : tois- : toise- ‘second’; rakkaus : rakkaut- : rakkaute- : rakkaukse- ‘love’. Morphophonemically it is possible to describe all nominals in terms of two basic stems.

^7a It is instructive to examine two other possible analyses of these data by different criteria.

First, if we group morphs on the basis of reference to meaning A and meaning B, we arrive at two genitives: genitive I' with meaning A and genitive II' with meaning B. Genitive I' has (-en ~ -den) ~ -ten; genitive II' has (-in ~ -ten) ~ (-en ~ -den). The result is a total of seven allomorphs, including three pairs of homophones. With each of these genitives one must list the stems of each nominal type that are used with each allomorph; e.g. the -ten of genitive I' is used with the consonant stem of the type pien- : piene-, the -en of genitive II' with the vowel stem of that type. One may draw his own conclusions about the economy of such a treatment.

A second alternative is based on meaning in a narrower sense, which does not distinguish between the usages from which meanings A and B are derived. By this view pappien and pappein have the same genitive meaning and are not in minimal contrast. The same is true of all nominal types; each type simply has two forms for the genitive plural. There is, therefore, only one genitive morpheme in the plural, with four allomorphs: (-en ~ -den) ~ (-in ~ -ten). One must state the usage of each allomorph for each nominal type with respect to meanings A and B; e.g. -ten has meaning A with the type pien- : piene-, -en has meaning B with that type. This is perhaps the simplest solution, provided that one can distinguish unerringly between meaning and usage. It is unlikely that this distinction underlies many post-Bloomfield definitions of linguistic meaning. Such a criterion forces us to set up also an accusative and a dative case (allative plus genitive-dative), and probably several others as well.

⁸ Setälä, Suomen kielioppi §91.1.12.

⁹ E. A. Saarimaa, Kielenopas ³ [Language guide] 35 (Helsinki, 1955).

¹⁰ Setälä, Suomen kielioppi §91.2.1.

¹¹ Genitive II is not found with certain nominal types in modern Finnish: the allomorph -in does not occur with the single-stem nominal types vapaa- ‘free’, vaikea- ‘difficult’; the allomorph -ten does not occur with the two-stem nominal types vene'- : venee- 'boat', ohut- : ohue- ‘thin’, ollut- : ollee- ‘been’. I have used the traditional way of indicating the so-called terminal aspiration (loppuhenkonen) of vene'-. Phonemically vene'- is simply /vene/. Morphophonemically, however, vene'- must be described as ending in a consonant. For more details on this feature see Thomas A. Sebeok, Spoken Finnish 139, practice 34.

¹² Setälä calls attention to this in a note at the end of his analysis of the genitive morpheme (Suomen kielioppi §78.4, muist. 2).