"Six articles in Changing scenes represent the ongoing reassessment of fin de siècle literature in Finnish research. The period was seen in earlier research as something of a national renaissance or ...golden age and interpreted in the light of its national symbols and meanings. Only recently has more attention been paid to its international dimensions and its role in the modernisation of Finnish culture. In particular the spotlight has been trained on the reflection in Finnish literature of manifestations of the degeneration thinking so common in Europe at that time. Research has also picked out works and writers that featured less in earlier studies. One modernist Finnish poet, Neustadt Prize-winning Paavo Haavikko, is also examined in an article representing the latest Finnish research in this field. "
This book concerns particles that are used as responses in conversations. It provides much needed methodological tools for analyzing the use of response particles in languages, while its particular ...focus is Finnish. The book focuses on two Finnish particles, nii(n) and joo, which in some of their central usages have "yeah" and "yes" as their closest English counterparts. The two particles are discussed in a number of sequential and activity contexts, including their use as answers to yes-no questions and directives, as responses to a stance-taking by the prior speaker, and in the midst of an extended telling by the co-participant. It will be shown how there is a fine-grained division of labor between the particles, having to do with the epistemic and affective character of the talk and the continuation vs. closure-relevance of the activity. The book connects theinteractional usages of the particles with what is known about their historical origins, and in this fashion it is also of interest to linguists doing research on processes of grammaticalization and lexicalization.
Riddles are a journey into a fascinating world rich in delightful metaphors and ambiguity. This book is based on material drawn from all over the world and analyses both traditional true riddles and ...contemporary joking questions. It introduces the reader to different riddling situations and the many functions of riddles, wich vary from education to teasing, and from defusing a heated situation to entertainment. In addition to providing a survey of international riddle scholarship, the book has a comprehensive bibliography with suggestions for further reading.
This corpus study presents a comparative analysis of the case of objects of various verb forms, and also subjects in existential clauses in five Finnic languages. Differences between present ...languages and historical changes in each language are discussed.
"This volume addresses the prominent, and in many ways highly similar, role that historical fiction has played in the formation of the two neighbouring ‘young nations’, Finland and Estonia. It gives ...a multi-sided overview of the function of the historical novel during different periods of Finnish and Estonian history from the 1800s until the present day, and it provides detailed close-readings of selected authors and literary trends in their social, political and cultural contexts. This book addresses nineteenth-century ‘fictional foundations’, historical fiction of the new nation states in the interwar period as well as post-Second World War Soviet Estonian novels and modern historiographic metafiction. The overall focus is on traditions of writing rather than on isolated highpoints, on chains of transnational influences and on narrative elements that recur both synchronically and diachronically. The volume shows historical fiction prefigured many narratives, tropes, heroes and events that academic history writing later adopted. The comparison of the two literary traditions also opens up a much broader view of how historical novels narrate the nation. While existing explorations of historical fiction have mostly been written from the perspective of the old and great nations, this book shows that the traditions of the young nations ‘without history’ often challenge many mainstream views on the genre."
Japanese intelligence operations in Scandinavia became active after the collapse of Poland in September 1939. Both the Japanese and the Finns exchanged information on Soviet military cryptography and ...tried to decrypt the enemy's codes. As a result of the cooperation, the Finns succeeded in decrypting Soviet naval code at the beginning of the Continuation War. Onodera Makoto, Japanese military attaché in Sweden, collected a lot of valuable information on the Allied Powers in the neutral country, though the General Staff in Tokyo disregarded them as unreliable.
Bilingual codeswitching is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon, which calls for explanations on several different linguistic levels. This volume focuses on one such level: the level of syntax. An ...explanation for the regularities and consistencies in the codeswitching patterns of American Finns in their spontaneous conversations is sought for in the Universal Grammar -based principle of government as realized in case-assignment and agreement relations. A bulk of the Finnish-English intrasentential data get their explanation on the structural, hierarchical level, but this level of syntax is found to be interestingly intertwined with sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and discourse levels, which all contribute to variation in codeswitching patterns. The proposed principle of government is seen as one important explanation in typologically certain kinds of language pairs such as Finnish and English; however, this principle is not treated as a monolithic constraint, but rather as the leading tendency which is occasionally overridden by other than syntactic forces.The volume is intended as a complement - not as a contradiction - to earlier explanations of codeswitching phenomena. Its main message is: while all linguistic levels contribute to the construction of bilingual speech, the importance of syntax can not be ignored.
In 1800, almost four times as many people spoke Irish as Finnish. That year the Act of Union joined Ireland to Great Britain; half of the population, over three million, were monoglot Irish speakers. ...Finland was then a part of the Kingdom of Sweden. An increasing number, perhaps 15%, spoke Swedish; the remainder, less than one million, spoke Finnish. A century later in 1900, however, as national agitation for independence grew in both countries, Ireland and Finland had become almost reverse mirror images linguistically. A tiny fraction of Irish people habitually spoke Irish, but Finnish had become the overwhelmingly dominant language in Finland. The present exploratory comparative study in language change points to three major conclusions: the importance of contingency, or chance, in such historical developments; the importance of individual agency; and the complexity and dynamic nature of the relationship between national identity and language.
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