Agglutinance in Finno-Ugric languages: deconstruction by PFM modeling

Abstract

Ugric, as well as Altaic languages, are supposed to match all the structural criteria of agglutination in grammar and the lexicon (transparency, univocity, etc.). This statement is often taken at face value, on the basis of literary or standard
varieties of languages such as Finnish or Hungarian. More seldom, reference is made to languages such as Estonian, Livonian or Votic, a bunch of southern Finnic languages whose morphology has mutated in a massive way towards (morpho)phonological inferential patterns – i.e., the “inflectional”, or even the “fusional type”. In this contribution, the premises that define agglutination are empirically revisited through a critical standpoint. We then apply an inferentialist model (Paradigm Function Morphology: PFM) to inflectional classes of Fennic languages, such as Finnish, considered through its dialect variation, Estonian, Livonian and Votic. We show that these languages respond more to an inferential inflectional drift than to the univocal mechanicism of agglutination proper. At the end of this empirical overview, we reach the conclusion that agglutination is worth being deconstructed in the light of dialectical facts and theoretical models provided by generative grammar. This critical survey through PFM modeling makes it possible to transcend aprioristic projections (positivist, idealist, 104 Cahiers du CLSL, n° 63, 2021 romantic) on the true nature of grammars in the World’s languages. In such an approach, from the prospect of G.U. (Universal Grammar), only the concepts of incrementiality and inferentiality prove to be truly heuristic, and make it possible to amplify the horizon of discovery of linguistic systems and structures in space and time.