A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal

The Finnish tail construction as first mention




AuthorsKatri Priiki

PublisherNordic Association of Linguists

Publication year2020

JournalNordic Journal of Linguistics

Journal acronymNJL

Volume43

Issue2

First page 181

Last page203

Number of pages23

ISSN0332-5865

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0332586520000104(external)

Web address https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nordic-journal-of-linguistics/article/finnish-tail-construction-as-a-first-mention/AB2196154489F983821FC0923745E7DB(external)


Abstract

This article examines the Finnish tail construction (right dislocation) used as a first mention of a referent and the variation of the demonstrative pronouns tämä ‘this’, tuo ‘that’, and se ‘it’ in the construction. Many previous studies have suggested that tail construction (TC) referents are highly active and thus already mentioned and salient in a conversation. However, in Finnish, the TC may introduce new referents into a conversation, and this article provides an empirical analysis of how and why this is done. First-mention TCs are often evaluations or questions in which the proposition links the utterance to the preceding context. When presenting new information, the TC allows the speaker to present a potentially lengthy lexical definition of a new referent at the end of the utterance, avoiding the additional emphatic meanings or unwanted implications a simply inverted word order might create.



Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 16:06