Case In Finnish Research Articles

Finlandisation or media logic? The Estonian–Russian border incident of 2014 in Finnish, Estonian and British press

This article examines the construction of the Estonian–Russian border incident of 2014, where an Estonian security officer ended captured by Russian authorities, in Finnish, Estonian and British press. It asks (a) How did the press construct the event and the actors in the reporting of the Kohver case in Finnish, Estonian and British press? What happened? Who did what? Who was responsible? What is the outcome of these constructions? Are there differences in national reporting? (b) Can ‘Finlandisation’ explain the discursive choices in the press constructions? By Finlandisation we refer to a hypothesis about the effects that the proximity of a major power in the context of international tension has on media discourse and culture more broadly. We argue that although the discourse of the Kohver case in Finnish, Estonian and British press could be subsumed under the term ‘Finlandisation’ in the case of the first two countries, a more fruitful approach would be to consider the discursive differences in the framework of the ‘domestication’ of news. This implies that explaining the tone of the news discourse is as much a matter of media logic as it is of underlying and/or implicit ideology.

Voice and case in finnish in the light of Zabrocki’s theory of person

Abstract Robert Bielecki. Voice and Case in Finnish in the Light of Zabrocki’s Theory of Person. Lingua Posnaniensis, vol. L IV (1)/2012. The Poznań Society for the A dvancement of the Arts and Sciences. PL ISSN 0079-4740, ISBN 978-83-7654-103-7, pp. 21-34. This paper attempts to demonstrate the properties of the categories of voice and case in Finnish in the light of Zabrocki’s theory of Person. The presented morphosyntactic, syntactic and semantic properties of words taking part in diathesis lead us to formulate sentences (theorems) belonging to the sphere of the postulated grammar of person of this language. In Finnish, particular personal meanings undergo both lexicalization (in the form of appropriate personal pronouns) and grammaticalization (in the form of personal endings). Moreover the Finnish language seems to operate with a collective personal meaning, where three particular communicative statuses do not undergo differentiation. This kind of personal meaning seems to be only grammaticalized in Finnish; it lacks a pronoun lexifying such a collective personal meaning. Because of the high degree of syncretism of the nominative and (endingless) accusative on the one hand and the passive and impersonal voice on the other, Finnish contains significant overlapping between passive structures - where the three personal meanings undergo specification - and impersonal structures - where the three personal meanings undergo unification. Notwithstanding, only in sentences of the type Kana on tapettu ‘One has killed the hen’, ‘The hen has been killed’ (and with smaller probability Kana tapetaan ‘One kills (will kill) the hen’, (‘The hen is (will be) killed’)) do we encounter total ambiguity in respect of the personal meaning semified by the predicate (the collective person vs. third person).

The Case of the Divisible Phase: Licensing Partitive Case in Finnish

Abstract. Case marking can interact with semantic interpretation in various ways, including differential case marking phenomena. This paper explores the interaction of partitive case in Finnish with the property of divisibility. It is argued that the appearance of partitive case can be related to divisibility. Most occurrences of partitive case are explained by a uniform treatment, which assumes that the divisibility of a phase affects the morphological realization of the [Case] feature minimally contained in the phase. This account extends to partitive case licensing by events; the case marked nominal itself; clausal negation; and prepositions as well. The discussion highlights the fact that morphological case is not necessarily determined by the licensing head. Instead, it can be determined within a local domain (a phase), the output of a cyclic Spell‐out system. The proposal also bears on issues such as the phasehood of DPs and the structure of restructuring constructions.

On structural case in Finnish and Korean

The Case Tier Hypothesis (CTH, Yip, Maling, and Jackendoff, 1987) accounts for the distribution of nominative and accusative in Finnish and Korean remarkably well, but a number of outstanding puzzles remain. We reformulate the CTH in Optimality Theory ( Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004), showing that the new proposal covers all the standard data and extends to several previously problematic phenomena, such as multiple nominatives and case variation in adverbials. After analyzing the core case patterns of Finnish and Korean, we go beyond these two languages and work out the general typological predictions of our proposal. This reveals what the theory admits and what it excludes, two central questions in theoretical linguistics.

Mismatches between grammatical number and conceptual numerosity: A number-decision experiment on collective nouns, number neutralization, pluralia tantum, and idiomatic plurals

Grammatical number marking does not always match with the actual, conceptual numerosity of entities to which the word refers. This is the case in Finnish, which has multiple ways of expressing numerosity. In the chronometric number-decision task that we conducted, we used the following morphological stimulus types: singular, neutral (with a possessive suffix that neutralizes the grammatical number distinction) and plural nouns, with the following semantic (cognitive) types of numerosity expression: ordinary nouns, collective nouns, pluralia tantum, and idiomatic plural forms. The main finding is that all stimulus classes are positioned on a cline of numerosity between one and many (with ordinary singulars and plurals marking the two terminal points), although Finnish has only two grammatical number categories, singular, and plural. Moreover, it appears that subjects have an intuition about the frequency of use of singular and plural forms, even in the case where the words are presented in a morphologically neutralized form. This is seen especially in the cases where the referent of a test item was locally marked as ‘one’ or ‘two’, as in the body-part nouns ‘navel’-poss and ‘eye’-poss.

Towards a typology of morphological case

Adposition phrases in morphologically impoverished languages have a function similar to nouns with morphological cases in morphologically rich languages, leading some researchers to argue that at least some cases belong to the category P. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether all cases can be analysed as Ps. The focus is on partitive case in Finnish. Whilst the ‘local’ cases in many languages appear to be strong candidates for analysis as members of the category P, it will be argued that partitive case (and genitive in languages where there is no distinct partitive) spells out a functional head between P and D, and that it properly belongs to the D-system (quantifiers or determiners), not the P-system. Thus morphological cases do not form a coherent category in syntax. Instead, morphological case paradigms relate to one of three different syntactic items: (i) uninterpretable features (structural cases), (ii) PP structures (cases expressing spatial or thematic relations), and (iii) determiner or quantifier projections (partitive, and partitive uses of genitive). Possible extensions of the analysis to other languages (German, Tongan and English) are explored.

A Question of Case

In this paper I investigate a seemingly optional variation between accusative and partitive case in Finnish in yes/no questions and certain kinds of negative contexts. I discuss two possible approaches: (i) the focus/background approach, which argues that the presence or absence of a focus/background partition guides the case alternation, and (ii) the negative polarity item (NPI) approach, which argues that the ‘optional’ partitive case is NPI-like. This second approach is built on the observation that contexts in which the alternation is licensed are also contexts which license NPI ‘anyone’ in Finnish. In addition, in the second part of the paper, I discuss how these hypotheses fit in with the semantic consequences of accusative and partitive case interacting with two types of disjunction in yes/no and alternative questions.

Case and Adverbials in Inari Saami and Finnish

This paper explores the relationship between case-marked adverbials and event structure in two related languages, Inari Saami and Finnish. New data is presented to show that while oblique case-marked adverbials do not delimit events in either language, the two languages diverge with respect to accusuative adverbials. Finnish shows a one-to-one mapping between case and event delimitation, while in Inari Saami not all accusative adverbials delimit events. These findings lend support to proposals by Arad (1998) and Tenny (1987) that each predicate may contain only one event delimiter.

Structural case in finnish

Finnish syntax and inflectional morphology support a parallel decomposition of abstract case and morphosyntactic/morphological case into two binary features. The correspondence between these levels is governed by ranked violable faithfulness constraints. The constraints are shown to account for the major clause types of Finnish, and their generality is demonstrated with a rudimentary typology of ergative case systems.