Finnish medial clusters of two consonants: Phonotaxis and history

This dissertation examines the phonotactics of medial clusters of two consonants in Finnish bisyllabic stems and seeks to discover patterns of segmentability in stems with the (C)VC;The study examines the corpus for segmentability patterns that occur in both natural and author-imposed divisions. The author establishes three continua based on the segmentability of the medial clusters, the affectivity of the stems and on the nativeness of the stems. These continua are used to describe the corpus and its phonotactic patterns. These three continua also serve as three perspectives from which the author examines segmentability in the corpus.;Examining these patterns leads the author to propose several new word families on the basis of their semantic and phonological coherence and also to put forth further evidence for word families previously proposed by other scholars. Examination of this corpus also leads to further questions on the architectonics of the word in Finnish.;The study finds that, while most medial clusters of two consonants in Finnish are unsegmentable, the clusters which are segmentable do yield important information on the phonotaxis of Finnish. It also finds that, even though the corpus is a restricted sample from the Finnish lexicon whose stems have been chosen for their adherence to the (C)VC...