Contrasting accounts of consonant gradation in Northern Sámi

Abstract

Nominals in Northern Sámi (Uralic) undergo a productive consonant gradation process, but it is not ubiquitous. One class in particular, odd-stemmed nominals, has a seemingly arbitrary 50/50 split in which nominals do and don't gradate. I present and defend two contrasting hypotheses to explain this dual patterning. The first is that whether a nominal undergoes gradation is completely arbitrary and each lexical entry is marked with a diacritic indicating whether it does. The second is that a ghost suffix from a final vowel in Proto-Sámi is present in the deep structure of certain nominals and blocks gradation.