A grammar of Pite Saami, 2014

5.4 Inflectional classes for nouns
For the majority of nouns, this suffix consists only of a vowel (in V2 position);
however, the class marking suffixes in the less frequent classes II and III deviate
from this pattern. The presence of umlaut alternations and/or consonant gradation
for a given noun is not dependent on the noun’s membership in a specific
class, but is determined by whether the phonemes occupying the V1 position
and the consonant center of the final foot, respectively, are susceptible to umlaut
and/or consonant gradation. Furthermore, some derivational suffixes (such
as the diminutive suffix -tj) can block consonant gradation and umlaut from happening
in the new derived form. Note that membership in a specific noun class
does not seem to be semantically motivated.
The following sections present the four inflectional noun classes based on a
preliminary analysis of the corpus; it is possible that, with more research, more
noun classes may result, or that the present classes may need revision. Because
each noun paradigm consists of seventeen inflectional forms, most of the data on
which these classes are based come from elicitation sessions, as it is far beyond
realistic for a single, non-native-speaker linguist to collect a sufficiently large
natural (i.e., un-elicited, spontaneous) spoken language corpus which includes
all inflectional forms for a large variety of nouns.
There are two main criteria for positing the different noun classesː
• the allomorphy of the nom.sg form of a noun stem in relation to the rest
of the inflectional paradigm (i.e., consonant gradation, umlaut)
• the regularity of the pattern of vowels occurring between the stem and
case/number suffixes (i.e., the class marking suffix)
To illustrate these differences, it is sufficient to look at the class suffix in nom.sg
and the alignment of consonant gradation allomorphs, as summarized in Table
5.10. The header grade alignment refers to the choice of stem allomorph in
nom.sg versus nom.pl whenever consonant gradation is relevant for a specific
Table 5.10: Noun classes and their defining features
grade class suffix
class alignment in nom.sg
I str-wk -a/á/o/å/e
II wk-str -Vj
III wk-str -
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