The Finnish tail construction as first mention
: Katri Priiki
Publisher: Nordic Association of Linguists
: 2020
: Nordic Journal of Linguistics
: NJL
: 43
: 2
: 181
: 203
: 23
: 0332-5865
DOI: https://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.