On the semantic interpretation of complex causatives in Finnish: An experimental morphology approach

Abstract

It is well documented that in some languages, such as in Finnish, it is possible to stack derivational morphemes iteratively to word stems. However, such complex words are seldom used in real communication, and it is unclear whether they are interpreted compositionally in tandem with their morphological structure. Here I studied the matter by eliciting semantic interpretations from ten native speakers of Finnish for words whose complexity and morphemic content were systematically varied. The results show that although the frequency of semantic interpretation decreases linearly as a function of the number of morphemes in a word (contrary to the case of ungrammatical words where the semantic interpretation is lacking), when the participants provided semantic analyses of complex words, these analyses were compositional or nearly compositional. Even three iteratively stacked causative morphemes were analyzed as a true triple causative, i.e., 'when some person makes another person to get a third person to eliminate that person'. I conclude that while speakers possess accurate linguistic knowledge of the semantic properties of iteratively formed words, some linguistic or extra-linguistic factors make the extraction of such meanings difficult. Some possible reasons for the existence of such limitations are discussed. Furthermore, I discuss the relevance of these findings to the theory of word formation and suggest that in addition to strict rules, word formation is subject to graded, soft constraints.