Although there is a large literature on referentiality, going back to at least the nineteenth and early twentieth century, much of this early work is based on constructed data and most of it is on English. The chapters in this volume contribute to a growing body of work that examines referentiality… read more
Edited by Jan Lindström, Ritva Laury, Anssi Peräkylä and Marja-Leena Sorjonen
Intersubjectivity is a precondition for human life – for social organization as well as for individual development and well-being. Through empirical examination of social interactions in everyday and institutional settings, the authors in this volume explore the achievement and maintenance of… read more
Edited by Tsuyoshi Ono, Ritva Laury and Ryoko Suzuki
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… read more
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… read more
The articles in this volume examine the notion of clausal subordination based on English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German and Japanese conversational data. Some of the articles approach ‘subordination’ in terms of social action, taking into account what participants are doing with their talk,… read more
The study of clause combining has been advanced lately by increasing interest in the study of actual language use in a typologically diverse set of languages. A number of received understandings have been challenged, among these the idea of clause combinations as being divisible into subordination… read more
This book concerns one of the paradigm examples of grammaticalization, the development of a definite article from a demonstrative determiner. Although standard written Finnish has no articles, the demonstrative se is currently emerging as a definite article in spoken Finnish. This book describes… read more
This chapter concerns the use of the word raha ‘money’ in Finnish everyday conversation. The main findings are that raha is most often used non-referentially in singular form in predications where only the category of money is at issue. When the word is used to create referential mentions of… read more
This chapter concerns expressions which seem internally contradictory because they consist of both a recognitional and a non-recognitional element. They contain both the Finnish demonstrative se ‘that, the’, a recognitional, as in se ihminen ‘that/the person’, and one of the indefinite… read more
This paper focuses on ‘clause’, a celebrated structural unit in linguistics, by comparing Finnish and Japanese, two languages which are genetically, typologically, and areally distinct from each other and from English, the language on the basis of which this structural unit has been most… read more
Our paper concerns two Finnish cognitive verbs, ajatella ‘think’, and tietää ‘know’. We show that both verbs are most likely to occur in the first person singular form but behave differently with respect to polarity: tietää occurs most commonly in the negated form (56%), while ajatella is only… read more
This chapter concerns the first person past tense form of the verb ajatella ‘to think’ as a semi-fixed expression in spoken Finnish. We examine this expression in present-day conversation and in older dialect interviews, focusing on its interactional functions, the types of complements it takes,… read more
This paper concerns the grammatical category of Finnish expressions initiated with se että (lit. ‘it that’). In earlier studies based on written data, they have been considered clausal NPs functioning as subjects, objects and complements. In our spoken data, both present-day and older, se että… read more
This chapter shows that the Finnish expression se että ‘it (is) that’, consisting of a demonstrative followed by a complementizer, is a fixed projective element in talk-in-interaction both on its own and with collocating elements. It shares features with projector phrases identified for other… read more
This paper focuses on ‘clause’, a celebrated structural unit in linguistics, by comparing Finnish and Japanese, two languages which are genetically, typologically, and areally distinct from each other and from English, the language on the basis of which this structural unit has been most… read more
Our paper concerns the grammar of clause combining in Finnish and Japanese conversation. We consider the patterns of clause combining in our data and focus on the verbal and non-verbal cues which allow participants to determine whether, after the end of a clause-sized unit, the turn will end or… read more
This article examines the Finnish että as a complementizer and as an initial and final particle in conversation. The article shows that että is not a subordinator either syntactically or actionally. Instead, the particle että, as well as the formulaic phrases (complement-taking constructions) it is… read more
The English I mean and the Japanese teyuuka differ syntactically and semantically, but they have similar pragmatized uses. Both verbs, mean and yuu, function as regular verbs in main clauses and also as part of formulaic expressions which indicate a modal meaning with respect to an utterance, or… read more
This paper concerns the use of the Finnish particle/conjunction et(tä) in ordinary conversation. Traditionally, että has been considered a complementizer, but we question the description of että-clauses as complements. We show that uses of että range from ones where it serves as a clause linker to… read more
This paper examines the use of että-clauses in Finnish everyday conversation for extending a speaker’s turn after a possible point of turn completion for the purpose of pursuing uptake from a turn recipient. Although että-clauses are considered complements in most grammatical descriptions of… read more
On the basis of empirical evidence it has been shown that mentions of human referents manifest features of prominence on the level of both discourse and grammar. This is so because they tend to be topical and agentive and are consequently likely to appear in core grammatical roles, especially in… read more
This paper examines the use of definite and indefinite noun phrases in everyday conversations in Finnish and English to establish meaning and to alter and build context in interaction. The paper shows that participants in conversation use the formal contrast between definite and indefinite NPs not… read more
