The Finnish tail construction as first mention




Katri Priiki

PublisherNordic Association of Linguists

2020

Nordic Journal of Linguistics

NJL

43

2

181

203

23

0332-5865

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0332586520000104

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



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