A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal

It Takes All Kinds to Make a Zero: Employing Multiple Correspondence Analysis to Categorize an Open Personal Construction in Conversational Finnish




AuthorsMikael Varjo

PublisherKorean Association for Corpus Linguistics

Publication year2019

JournalCorpus Linguistics Research

Article number3

Volume5

First page 55

Last page87

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.18659/CLR.2019.5.03


Abstract

This article explores the usage patterns of an open personal construction in Finnish, namely the so-called zero-person construction in naturally occurring conversational discourse, and provides a bottom-up model of these patterns. The aims of this article are twofold. Firstly, the article attempts to shed more light on the functional groupings of zero-person constructions in conversational discourse. Secondly, it tests the suitability of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in categorizing a linguistic construction on the basis of its semantico-grammatical and contextual features. Based on the MCA, three distinct groups of zero-person constructions are identified and examined in detail, namely the Narrative, Reactive and Evaluative zero-person constructions. At the macro-level, the article shows the advantages of a usage-based approach combining both quantitative and qualitative methods on the study of interaction and personal constructions. At the micro-level, it offers an example of the use of the MCA in examining a syntactic construction based on its semantico-grammatical and discourse features.



Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 18:46