Morphology and scale structure: On -ish in Finnish

Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California)

Many aspects of language refer to degrees on scales. Sometimes, an expression can apparently target various scale types. For example, -ish can attach to different categories (including adjectives, nouns, numerals) and has been analyzed as targeting scales of degrees contributed by gradable adjectives (e.g. tall-ish) and scales of precision contributed by metalinguistic coercion/type-shifting (e.g. three-ish). This flexibility has sparked debates about whether -ish can receive a unified analysis. To broaden the empirical basis, I use data from two approximative adjectival suffixes in Finnish, -hkO and -VhtAvA, to show that depending on the category of the modified expression, which is correlated with the scale being targeted, different morphemes are used. More specifically, I analyze the suffix -hkO as (a) signaling proximity to a standard on a scale lexically contributed by the gradable adjective that -hkO modifies (e.g. suurehko ‘large-ish’, kaarevahko ‘curved-ish’), and the other suffix -VhtAvA as (b) signaling proximity to a prototypical denotation of the noun that -VhtAvA modifies (ranskahtava ‘French-ish, resembling the French language’, trumpahtava ‘Trump-ish’). Though the meanings are related, the fact that Finnish encodes them with two morphemes indicates they are semantically distinct: different morphemes attach to different bases and target different scales, unlike the case of English -ish, where one morpheme is used regardless of scale type and the category of the linguistic element.