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The Finnish tail construction as a first mention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2020

Katri Priiki Open the ORCID record for Katri Priiki [Opens in a new window]
Katri Priiki*
Affiliation:
School of Languages and Translation Studies, FI-20014University of Turku, Finland
*
Email for correspondence: katri.priiki@utu.fi
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

demonstrativesdislocationFinnishtailword order
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , October 2020 , pp. 181 - 203
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Nordic Association of Linguistics

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