Other (O2)
Thinking in Finnish: Fixed expressions and the verb ajatella ''think'' in Finnish conversation – Panel contribution to Fixed expressions as units, organized by Helasvuo Marja-Liisa & Ryoko Suzuki (14th International Pragmatics Conference, Antwerp, Belgium)
Subtitle: Panel contribution to Fixed expressions as units, organized by Helasvuo Marja-Liisa & Ryoko Suzuki (14th International Pragmatics Conference, Antwerp, Belgium)
List of Authors: Marja-Liisa Helasvuo, Ritva Laury, Mari Nikonen
Publication year: 2015
Our paper concerns the use of the verb ajatella ‘to think’ in Finnish conversational interaction. We show that there are clear formulaic patterns of usage that emerge from the data for the verb ajatella. We explore these patterns and their morphosyntactic, phonetic and prosodic features and the interactional functions they accomplish. Prior studies have shown that cognition verbs tend to crystallize into fixed units in a range of languages (e.g. Östman 1981; Thompson & Mulac 1991; Tao 2003 and Kärkkäinen 2003, 2012 on English; Endo 2010, 2013 and Tao 2013 on Mandarin; Laury & Okamoto 2011 on English and Japanese; Keevallik 2003 on Estonian; Helasvuo 2014 on Finnish). A general observation has been that as the expressions become phonetically eroded, they lose their status as complement-taking constructions, becoming what Thompson (2002) has called an ‘epistemic fragments’, and eventually form units which can be considered particles, appearing freely in a range of syntactic positions, and carrying a range of functions from hedging to stance-taking of various kinds. Our data come from a database of everyday Finnish conversations among friends and family, consisting of over 8 hours of conversation and containing 132 occurrences of ajatella ‘to think’. The data come from conversational corpora housed at the Universities of Helsinki and Turku. Our analysis shows that ajatella ‘to think’ overwhelmingly occurs in past tense and is combined with 1st person subjects. There is also a clear preference for affirmative polarity. The clearest pattern of usage that emerges from the data is one where the 1st person singular pronoun is combined with the verb ajatella in its past tense form carrying the 1st person singular person marking. The data show considerable phonetic erosion in the instantiations of this pattern: the first two syllables of the verb (a and ja) are often merged into one, and the pronoun is cliticized to the verb. In its use as a framing clause, the expression may become further eroded and may include in one prosodic word also a reduced form of the complementizer että ‘that’, resulting in a fragment with the form m’aatet (on prosodic words, see Aho 2010: 42–43; Bruce 1998: 80, 124 –126). We will explore the connection of the erosion of form with the conversational functions this element carries as a preface to suggestions and proposals of various kinds (Stevanovic 2013; Laury & Lindström 2014) and as a stance-taking device comparable to the English I thought (Kärkkäinen 2012) or the Mandarin wo juede ‘I feel, I think’(Endo 2010, 2013).