•The Finnish verb repeat response is not best described as resulting from ellipsis.•It results from copying and manifests the pervasive dialogism of talk-in-interaction.•The verb repeat response is a ...dynamic, emergent unit.•Only one of its many formats approaches the status of a fixed expression.
This volume concerns the structure and use of fixed expressions in a range of typologically, genetically and areally distinct languages. The chapters consider the use contexts of fixed expressions, ...at the same time taking seriously the need to account for their structural aspects. Formulaicity is taken here as a central feature of everyday language use, and fixed expressions as a basic utterance building resource for interaction. Our crosslinguistic investigation suggests that humans have the propensity to automatize ways to handle various discourse-level needs for specific sequential contexts by creating (semi-)fixed expressions based on frequent patterns. The chapters examine topics such as the degrees and types of fixedness, the emergence of fixed expressions, their connection to social action, the new understanding of traditional linguistic categories in light of fixedness, crosslinguistic variation in types of fixed expressions, as well as their non-verbal aspects. The volume situates the notion of 'units' of language at the intersection of interaction and formal structure as part of a larger effort to replace rule-based conceptions of language with a more dynamic, realistic and pragmatically based model of language. The articles are based on naturally occurring data, mostly everyday conversation, in English, Estonian, Finnish, Japanese, Mandarin, and Swedish, with some crosslinguistic comparison.
The article concerns relative clause constructions and their main clauses in Estonian and Finnish conversation. The study shows that copula clauses and existential clauses predominate in the corpus ...data: these two clause types accounted for more than half of the main clauses. Such main clauses serve simply to introduce a referent which is then predicated upon in the relative clause and is likely to be subsequently discussed in the conversation. In addition, relative clauses are also used without any main clauses, headed with just a nominal, a free NP. The article thus shows that the main clauses of relative clauses in Estonian and Finnish conversation tend to be syntactically light. They are also pragmatically light, since it is the relative clause, and not the main clause, which contains the main information in the clause combination. This raises a question about the subordinate status of the relative clause. Kokkuvõte. Ritva Laury, Renate Pajusalu, Marja-Liisa Helasvuo: Kas pealause on tõesti „pea”lause? Relatiivlaused eesti ja soome suulises keeles. Artikkel tegeleb relatiivlausete konstruktsioonide pealausetega eesti ja soome suulistes vestlustes. Uurimus näitab, et predikatiivlaused ja eksistentsiaallaused on suulises kõnes kõige tavalisemad, nendesse lausetüüpidesse kuulus üle poole meie materjali pealausetest. Sellised pealaused ainult esitlevad referenti, mille kohta just relatiivlause annab olulist informatsiooni. Relatiivlause konstruktsiooniga vestlusesse toodud referent on hiljem tihti edasise vestluse oluline teema. Lisaks kasutatakse relatiivlauseid tihti ilma pealauseteta, nii et nad laiendavad vaba nimisõnafraasi. Artikkel näitab seega, et eesti ja soome vestluste relatiivlausete pealaused on süntaktiliselt kerged. Nad on kerged ka pragmaatiliselt, kuna just relatiivlause, mitte aga pealause, annab põhilise informatsiooni. Siit tekib küsimus relatiivlause kui kõrvallause staatusest ja selle alistatusest.
The chapters in this volume focus on how we might understand the concept of 'unit' in human languages. It is an analytical notion that has been widely adopted by linguists of various theoretical and ...applied orientations but has recently been critically examined by both typologically oriented and interactional linguistics.
The contributions show how language codes and creates intersubjectivity, how interactants move towards shared understanding in interaction, how intersubjectivity is central to phenomena and ...experiences often considered merely individual, and how intersubjectivity evolves through learning.
This article concerns insubordination, the use of clause types ordinarily considered subordinate without main clauses (Evans 2007). We study the use of insubordinate relative clauses (RCs) in two ...corpora, the Arkisyn corpus of contemporary Finnish conversation and the Agricola corpus from the 16th century. Our main findings are that the construction is put to very similar uses in the two corpora, but that it is more common in the newer corpus. We show that insubordination of RCs existed along with subordination already in the earliest records of Finnish language use. Thus, insubordination of RCs is not a more recent development than their use as subordinate clauses. We conclude that the more frequent use in the newer data is likely not a result of a process of grammaticalization that would have occurred since the 16th century.
Kokkuvõte. Marja-Liisa Helasvuo, Ritva Laury: Pealauseta relatiivlaused soome keeles – vanad ja uued. Siinses artiklis käsitleme insubordinatsiooni ehk teiste sõnadega selliseid lauseid, mis loetakse tüüpjuhul kõrvallauseteks, kuid esinevad ilma pealauseta. Uurime soome keele relatiivlauseid, millel puudub pealause. Keeleainestik pärineb kahest korpusest: tänapäeva soome kõnekeelt sisaldavast korpusest Arkisyn ja 16. sajandi keelenäiteid sisaldavast korpusest Agricola. Meie tähelepanekud näitavad, et mainitud konstruktsioon esineb mõlemas keelekorpuses, kuid uuemas ainestikus on selle kasuta- mine tavalisem. Osutame oma uurimuses, et nii insubordinatsioon kui subordinatsioon esinevad juba varajastes soome keele tekstides. Seega ei ole ilma pealauseta relatiivlause kasutamine uuem keelenähtus kui pealausega relatiivlausete kasutamine. Meie uurimus näitab, et insubordinatsiooni sagedasemat esinemist uuema keeleainestiku relatiivlausetes ei peaks tõlgendama 16. sajandist alates arenema hakanud grammatikaliseerumise nähtusena.
The paper discusses cases in which referents that have not been mentioned previously are assessed without any overt mention of those referents but are rather made accessible through multimodal means, ...which are finely calibrated with what else is going on in the conversation. The authors suggest that the cases discussed raise important questions about reference and referentiality. The data are multiperson conversations in Italian and Finnish.
PDF
