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Article published In: Beyond Corpus Data — Complementary and Alternative Methods in Cognitive Linguistics
Edited by Anton Granvik, Veera Hatakka, Olli O. Silvennoinen, Riku Erkkilä and Eveliina Mäntylä
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 23:2] 2025
► pp. 408–439

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Special issue article

Is the FROM construction community-specific?

The coalescence of Finnish cases and Swedish and Spanish prepositions in the Helsinki metropolitan area

 | University of Helsinki
 | HANKEN School of Economics
 | University of Helsinki
Published online: 26 August 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00225.gra
Abstract
Multilingual speakers often display what has traditionally been considered linguistic interference. It is well known that Finnish influences the language use of speakers of other languages, such as Swedish. This study focuses on how Finnish the FROM-cases elative and ablative affect the linguistic patterns of Spanish and Swedish speakers. Due to the lack of corpus data for Helsinki Spanish and relevant examples in available Finland-Swedish corpora, we elicited language samples by asking participants to describe video clips depicting scenarios like “buying something from a store” or “climbing out (from) a window.” Our aim is to assess how Swedish and Spanish speakers’ prepositional choices reflect the conceptualization exemplified by the Finnish way of using the FROM construction. We propose that the converging usage patterns we observe indicate the existence of a common FROM construction among speakers residing in the Helsinki metropolitan area.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Finnish, Swedish and Spanish in Finland
    • 2.2The Finnish case system and the FROM construction
    • 2.3Theoretical framework
  • 3.Data and methods
  • 4.Analysis and results
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (51)
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