Ritva Laury

Cet article aborde un dispositif referentiel qui va a l'encontre de ce qui est habituellement considere comme attendu: l'emploi des formes indefinies pour designer des referents qui ont deja fait l'objet d'une mention prealable dans la meme conversation. L'auteur examine les explications cognitives et interactionnelles qui ont ete proposees pour l'emploi des expressions referentielles, et conclut que les facteurs cognitifs ne permettent pas a eux seuls de rendre compte de ce dispositif. Elle suggere que les formes utilisees par les locuteurs sont motivees non seulement par l'identifiabilite et l'accessibilite cognitive des referents pour l'allocutaire, mais aussi par le type d'action dans lequel les participants de la conversation sont engages, l'organisation sequentielle de la conversation et le cadre de participation cree et maintenu par les participants a travers leur interaction langagiere.

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 typically discussed. We first examine how structural units including the clause have been discussed in the literature on Finnish and Japanese. We will then examine the reality of the clause in everyday talk in these languages quantitatively and qualitatively; in our qualitative analysis, we focus in particular on what units are oriented to by conversational participants. The current study suggests that the degree of grammaticization of the clause varies cross-linguistically and questions the central theoretical status accorded to this structural unit.

This paper concerns a particular grammatical construction, extraposition, and its use for assessments at points of transition between activities and topics by speakers of Finnish in ordinary conversation. A basic assumption taken here is that “recurrent clausal constructions of a language are social action formats for that language” (Thompson 2006), and that grammatical constructions such as clause types are learned and therefore routinized responses to certain types of interactional contingencies, and, at the same time, emergent from the current local context (Hopper 1987; Helasvuo 2001).The paper combines the two central perspectives developed in this issue, sequential design and dialogicality, with the study of grammar-in-interaction. It shows that the grammatical form of the Finnish extraposition construction emerges from its use by speakers for the creation of intersubjectivity through reproduction of prior talk and for the projection of stance taking to follow.

Regarding the category of se : does Finnish have an article yet? (englanti) 2/1996 (100) Ritva Laury (Department of Linguistics, California State University, Fresno; edu) REGARDING THE CATEGORY OF SE: DOES FINNISH HAVE AN ARTICLE YET? This paper concerns the current lexical category of the determiner se in spoken Finnish. Although linguists have known at least since the late 1800s that the demonstrative se is developing into a definite article, there has been a lack of general agreement about the contexts in which se may or may not be used. However, those who have researched this topic do generally agree that se is not yet an article. This paper takes the opposite view. Based on an examination of the use of se in a database consisting of spoken narratives and ordinary conversations, the author proposes that se is already an article. Viewed from the perspective of Greenberg's (1978) diachronic typology, the Finnish se is no longer a Stage 0 demonstrative on its way to becoming an article. In that stage of the development, according to Greenberg, the future article is typically used to refer back to something that has already been mentioned earlier. While se was most commonly used in such contexts in narratives recorded in the late 1800s, in more recently recorded narratives, se is used as a general marker of identifiability, regardless of earlier mention, which would make it a Stage I article in Greenberg's typology. In the most recent data recorded in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, se is also used more frequently than what would be expected of a demonstrative, and its use frequency approaches that of articles in those languages that have them, particularly so for younger speakers. Further, se is omitted in contexts which resemble those in which languages that do have articles also use bare NPs. Se is not used with proper names, kinterms, and NPs referring to other situationally bound social roles when they are used as co-recognitionals (Downing 1995); it is also left out with NPs which are not used discourse referentially (Du Bois 1980), such as body part nouns and certain types of obliques. The author suggests that while se is already an article in spoken Finnish, it is not yet fully grammaticized, but that the contexts in which se is used and those in which it is left out display rather transparently the motivations which have lead to the grammaticization of definite articles in certain contexts in article-bearing languages.

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 and explains the developing use of se based on a database consisting of spoken narratives from three different periods spanning the last one hundred years. The author proposes that the development from demonstrative to article has its roots in the way that speakers ordinarily use demonstratives in conversation, and provides an analysis of the use of se and the two other Finnish demonstratives, tama and tuo in a corpus of multi-party conversations, showing that speakers of Finnish use demonstratives to focus attention on important referents and to express and negotiate access to them in the interactive context of ongoing talk, and not primarily to talk about how near or far referents are. The development of se into a general marker of identifiability is shown to be connected with both the focusing function of demonstratives as well as its use for referents which the speaker considers accessible to the addressee.

... Ssg 2sg-GEN 'This is yours.' (playmobil) In line 6, S uses a vocative third-person form, V's first name, in ini-tial position just before she addresses V using a second-person pro-noun in line 7. The fact that V's previous turn in lines 3 and 4 con-tains the second pair part of an ...

... so 1SG advise-1SG 2SG-ALLAT gold-mountain-ACC " and I'll tell you about a golden mountain'." (5) Se sano:" Ei, hyi, en mină huoli. 3SG said no yuck NEG-1SG 1SG care " She said,'No, yuck, I don't want to'." (6) Mină olen kuninkaalle menossa piiaksi." 1SG be-lSG king-ALLAT ...

... NEWMEYER, FREDERICK. 1998. Language form and language function. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. NEWMEYER, FREDERICK. ... DISCUSSION NOTES 225 SEPPANEN, EEVA-LEENA. 1998. Lisnaiolon pronominit: Timi, tuo, se ja hin viittaamassa keskustelun osallistujaan. ...

... as culturally shared frames (Chafe 1976, 1994; Clark and Marshall 1981; Du Bois 1980; Gundel et al 1993; Hawkins 1978; Lambrecht 1994, and ... In example (11) below, Eija and Anneli are telling their mutual friend, Riitta, about a recent evening they had spent together at a ...

... form et. It is quite possible that the variation in form is meaningful on some level, but here we treat the two variants as equivalents. Page 2. 554 Eeva-Leena Seppänen and Ritva Laury speaker could therefore take a turn. In particular ...

... as culturally shared frames (Chafe 1976, 1994; Clark and Marshall 1981; Du Bois 1980; Gundel et al 1993; Hawkins 1978; Lambrecht 1994, and ... In example (11) below, Eija and Anneli are telling their mutual friend, Riitta, about a recent evening they had spent together at a ...

... of voice quality PETER AUSTIN: A grammar of Diyari, South Australia ALICE c. I-IARRIs: Georgian syntax MARTIN ATKINSON2 Explanations in the study of child language development' SUZANNE FLEISCHMAN: Thefuture in thought and language JENNY cHEsHIRE: Variation ...

... Pragmatics & Beyond New Series Editors: Jacob L. Mey (Odense University) Herman Parret ... Co.-PO Box 75577~ 1070 AN Amsterdam~ The Netherlands John Benjamins North ... Mithun examines the role of intonational segmentation in signalling the relative accessibility of ...