Ritva Laury

This book presents some of the most recent research on Finnish and Estonian pronouns and other minimal forms of reference. The articles deal with features particular to the pronoun systems of Finnic languages, such as logophoricity and the use of demonstratives for human referents, as well as other topics of current interest in research into the nature of pronominal reference, in particular the contextual, interactive and grammatical factors which influence the use and interpretation of pronouns. An international group of authors approach these questions from several theoretical frameworks including psycholinguistics, syntax, conversation analysis and discourse analysis. The volume is the first collection of articles on this topic published in English. Authors include Outi Duvallon, Marja Etel채m채ki, P채ivi Juvonen, Elsi Kaiser, Lea Laitinen, Renate Pajusalu, Eeva-Leena Sepp채nen, and the editor, Ritva Laury.

The use of pronouns in Finnish and Estonian discourse

Minimal reference

Tsuyoshi Ono

This volume concerns the structure and use of fixed expressions in a range of typologically, genetically and areally distinct languages. The chapters consider the use contexts of fixed expressions, at the same time taking seriously the need to account for their structural aspects. Formulaicity is taken here as a central feature of everyday language use, and fixed expressions as a basic utterance building resource for interaction. Our crosslinguistic investigation suggests that humans have the propensity to automatize ways to handle various discourse-level needs for specific sequential contexts by creating (semi-)fixed expressions based on frequent patterns. The chapters examine topics such as the degrees and types of fixedness, the emergence of fixed expressions, their connection to social action, the new understanding of traditional linguistic categories in light of fixedness, crosslinguistic variation in types of fixed expressions, as well as their non-verbal aspects. The volume situates the notion of ‘units’ of language at the intersection of interaction and formal structure as part of a larger effort to replace rule-based conceptions of language with a more dynamic, realistic and pragmatically based model of language. The articles are based on naturally occurring data, mostly everyday conversation, in English, Estonian, Finnish, Japanese, and Mandarin, with some crosslinguistic comparison.

Building language structure and social action

Fixed Expressions

This volume concerns the structure and use of fixed expressions in a range of typologically, genetically and areally distinct languages. The chapters consider the use contexts of fixed expressions, at the same time taking seriously the need to account for their structural aspects. Formulaicity is taken here as a central feature of everyday language use, and fixed expressions as a basic utterance building resource for interaction. Our crosslinguistic investigation suggests that humans have the propensity to automatize ways to handle various discourse-level needs for specific sequential contexts by creating (semi-)fixed expressions based on frequent patterns. The chapters examine topics such as the degrees and types of fixedness, the emergence of fixed expressions, their connection to social action, the new understanding of traditional linguistic categories in light of fixedness, crosslinguistic variation in types of fixed expressions, as well as their non-verbal aspects. The volume situates the notion of 'units' of language at the intersection of interaction and formal structure as part of a larger effort to replace rule-based conceptions of language with a more dynamic, realistic and pragmatically based model of language. The articles are based on naturally occurring data, mostly everyday conversation, in English, Estonian, Finnish, Japanese, and Mandarin, with some crosslinguistic comparison.

Building Language Structure and Social Action

P. J. Mistry

The volume presents 25 papers in diverse areas of theoretical and applied linguistics contributed by different scholars as a tribute to Prof P J Mistry. The papers are devoted to the areas of syntax, phonology, morphology, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, text linguistics, forensic linguistics and typology. The volume is co-edited by Professors Ritva Laury, Gerald McMenamin, Shigeko Okamoto, Vida Samiian and KV Subbarao.

Papers in Honor of P.J. Mistry

Perspectives in Linguistics

Anssi Peräkylä

Marja-Leena Sorjonen

Jan Lindström

Intersubjectivity is a precondition for human life – for social organization as well as for individual development and well-being. Through empirical examination of social interactions in everyday and institutional settings, the authors in this volume explore the achievement and maintenance of intersubjectivity. The contributions show how language codes and creates intersubjectivity, how interactants move towards shared understanding in interaction, how intersubjectivity is central to phenomena and experiences often considered merely individual, and how intersubjectivity evolves through learning. While the core methodology of the studies is Conversation Analysis, the volume highlights the advantages of using several methods to tackle intersubjectivity.

Studies in language and social interaction

Intersubjectivity in Action

This book concerns one of the paradigm examples of grammaticalization, the development of a definite article from a demonstrative determiner. Although standard written Finnish has no articles, the demonstrative se is currently emerging as a definite article in spoken Finnish. This book describes and explains the developing use of se based on a database consisting of spoken narratives from three different periods spanning the last one hundred years. The author proposes that the development from demonstrative to article has its roots in the way that speakers ordinarily use demonstratives in conversation, and provides an analysis of the use of se and the two other Finnish demonstratives, tämä and tuo in a corpus of multi-party conversations, showing that speakers of Finnish use demonstratives to focus attention on important referents and to express and negotiate access to them in the interactive context of ongoing talk, and not primarily to talk about how near or far referents are. The development of se into a general marker of identifiability is shown to be connected with both the focusing function of demonstratives as well as its use for referents which the speaker considers accessible to the addressee.

The Emergence of a Definite Article in Finnish

Demonstratives in Interaction

Ryoko Suzuki

The chapters in this volume focus on how we might understand the concept of ‘unit’ in human languages. It is an analytical notion that has been widely adopted by linguists of various theoretical and applied orientations but has recently been critically examined by both typologically oriented and interactional linguistics. This volume contributes to and extends this discussion by examining the nature of units in actual usage in a range of genetically and typologically unrelated languages, English, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, and Mandarin, engaging with fundamental theoretical issues. The chapters show that categories originally created for the description of Indo-European languages have limited usefulness if our goal is to understand the nature of human language in general. The authors thus question the status of traditionally accepted linguistic units, especially their static understanding as a priori entities, and suggest instead that an emergent and interactional view of both structure and function offers a better fit with the data from the languages examined. Originally published as special issue 43:2 (2019) of Studies in Language.

Ritva Laury

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