Lenition and morphology in Finnish

Abstract

This paper investigates an interaction between consonant lenition and morphology in Finnish. The language has a process of consonant lenition whereby underlying geminate consonants at syllable boundaries lenite (degeminate) when the addition of an affix makes the post-geminate rime bimoraic. A small class of possessor agreement affixes do not condition lenition, even if they create the appropriate phonological environment. A puzzling interaction emerges when possessor agreement affixes are stacked on top of certain lenition-conditioning affixes. I account for this interaction in a way that improves on Kiparsky's (2003) analysis. In doing so, I extend Pater's (2010) method for modeling exceptional phonology via lexically-indexed constraints.