
Demonstratives in Interaction
The emergence of a definite article in Finnish
Ritva Laury(Author)
John Benjamins Publishing Co
Published on 3. July 1997
Book
Hardback
294 pages
978-90-272-2617-4 (ISBN)
Description
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, taemae 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 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, taemae 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.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Amsterdam
Netherlands
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 245 mm
Width: 164 mm
Weight
540 gr
ISBN-13
978-90-272-2617-4 (9789027226174)
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E-Book
07/1997
1st Edition
John Benjamins Publishing Company
€144.99
Available for download
Person
Content
1. Acknowledgements; 2. 1. Introduction; 3. 2. Deixis and Identifiability; 4. 3. The Finnish demonstratives; 5. 4. The grammaticization of se as a marker of identifiability; 6. Notes; 7. Appendix; 8. References; 9. Author Index; 10. Subject Index