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

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.