Finnic Adpositions and Cases in Change (review)

Finno-Ugric languages are well known for their rich inflectional systems. Especially notable is noun inflection: a large inventory of cases in combination with adpositions services the expression of several noun phrase functions. The book deals with the diachronic aspects of adpositions and cases in Finnic languages, paying special attention to Veps and Livonian, but also considering Estonian, Finnish, and Vote. These languages—albeit a genetically concise group—display a considerable amount of typological divergence, particularly with respect to the morphosyntax of adpositions and cases. The book consists of seven chapters: the first three are introductory, Chs. 4–6 constitute the empirical part of the book, and the final chapter provides a short summary.

Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (13–18), sets out the data sources and data encoding conventions of the book. Ch. 2, ‘Contrasting the Finnic languages’ (19–31), introduces the subject languages and offers an overview of their morphosyntactic properties. The theoretical perspective to diachronic change is discussed in Ch. 3, ‘Erosive and preservative forces in morphosyntactic change’ (32–44). In this chapter, Riho Grünthal argues against the unidirectional approaches to language change and emphasizes that morphological change proceeds by combining erosive/reductive and preservative forces.

Ch. 4, ‘Finnic adpositional phrase’ (45–115), covers the morphosyntactic properties of adpositional phrases. It is remarkable that all Finnic languages display both postpositions and prepositions. The positional variation of adpositions is accompanied by other morphosyntactic properties such as case inflection and is in general semantically conditioned. The rest of the chapter addresses the adpositional phrase in Livonian, particularly discussing the interplay between constituent order and erosion of the case morphology.

Ch. 5, ‘The evolution of the Veps local case system’ (116–59), considers a cyclic diachronic process, which is attested in Veps local cases. The locative and ablative cases merged together after a process of phonological erosion. The resulting syncretism of two spatial functions (‘motion from’ and ‘location at’) is compensated for at a later stage through the development of a new ablative morpheme. This process illustrates the interaction between erosive processes and the preservative force of established functional categories.

Ch. 6, ‘Language contact and morphosyntactic change’ (160–202), contains two case studies on language contact. In Southern Veps the prolative case (originally meaning ‘along’) has been extended to also cover comitative functions. The development of the prolative-comitative morpheme is induced by Russian influence. Similarly, the Livonian translative case (originally meaning ‘such as’) has broadened to translative-comitative due to influence from Latvian. In both cases, it is shown that contact-induced change takes place in the form of crosslinguistic analogy based on structural similarities between the interacting languages.

In sum, the book is not intended to give a complete description of the diachronic development of adpositions and cases in Finnic, but rather to illustrate different types of diachronic change that have taken place in this grammatical domain. One major merit is that the book gives a detailed treatment of diachronic processes in endangered Finnic languages that are not widely known in historical linguistic studies. The subject of the book is of particular interest to historical linguists and typologists, but in addition, the analysis is accessible to a general linguistic audience. The use of grammatical terminology does not impose any theory-specific requirements for the reader. Cited examples from Finnic languages are provided with morphemic transcriptions (glosses), so they are comprehensible without previous knowledge of the subject languages.