Typology, chronology, and phonetic mechanisms of Finnic secondary gemination in the light of Soikkola Ingrian acoustic data

Secondary gemination is a remarkable but little-known phonological process of singleton consonant lengthening into geminates in certain prosodic positions in Finnic languages. Its phonetic premises, typology, and chronology are still understudied. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, it summarises the main facts about secondary gemination and its place within general prosodic tendencies observed in Finnic languages. Second, it uses acoustic data from Soikkola Ingrian, which manifests one of the most developed Finnic systems of secondary gemination, to argue about the relative chronology and phonetic mechanisms of this gemination. The conclusion is that the phonetic duration of phonologised secondary geminates cannot be used as an argument for their age, because, as our acoustic data in [1] showed, their duration is regulated by compensatory stress-induced shortening as a function of the foot structure. On the other hand, the atypical prosodic positions of trisyllabic secondary gemination in Soikkola Ingrian can indeed suggest the younger age of this particular type of gemination.