The topic of this article is the syntax of Finnish comitative markers mukana and mukaan
‘with, along’. Comitative markers express accompaniment relations,
which are typically conceived of being asymmetrical: the accompanee is
the predominant participant, while the companion is involved in the
situation only via the accompanee (Stolz et al. 2006: 26–27). However, markers such as mukana and mukaan
are used in several syntactic constructions where the grammatical roles
of expressions of the accompanees vary from subject to adverbial, that
is, from syntactic core to periphery. Five syntactic construction types
were analyzed from a corpus data showing three genres. On the basis of
this study, it is shown that syntactic variation has an effect on the
conceived asymmetry between the accompanee and the companion, and that
syntax makes an important contribution to the semantics of comitative
constructions. In strongly asymmetric accompaniment relations, a human
accompanee is expressed by a possessive suffix affixed to the comitative
marker, or by a clause-initial adverbial. The question of asymmetry
contracts to the background when the accompanee is expressed by a
non-clause-initial adverbial and when the accompanee is implicit,
without overt marking altogether.