4.3 Theme-to-event homomorphism
4.6.1 Temporal quantification of Finnish sentence
Similarly to Polish, Finnish does not have any separate verbal marking of existen-tial and universal quantification.
Nonetheless, the Perfect often expresses non-specific quantification, as the focus of the localising of TSIT in the Perfect function of result, experiential or recent past (see above, Section 4.4) is related to some moment before the TU, while the specific location of theTRto whichTSITis assigned is out of focus.
Universally quantified sentences are mostly formulated in the Non-past. In that context, sentences often take a subjectless third person singular form, the missing person(Hakulinen & Karttunen 1973) as in (83a), or impersonal (83b):
(83) a. Kotona home.ESS
ikävästyy.
be.bored.REFL.3SG
‘One gets bored at home.’
b. Englannissa
‘In England one drives on the left side of the road.’
The missing-person sentence, is quite restricted as to its usage in comparison to impersonal constructions:
(‘In England one drives on the left side of the road’)
This constraint can be partly explained by politeness strategies, which, accord-ing to Hakulinen (1987), in Finnish include hidaccord-ing the agent. The missaccord-ing-person construction has conventionalised to the function of generalisations applying to the speaker or the addressee of the utterance.
The agent can be hidden in universal quantification by detransitivisers as in example (3), discussed in Section 4.2.1:
(3) Automatisoitu press.INF3.ADE
(...) .
‘Automatic doors open easily when pressing the button.’34
4.6.2 Quantification over referents
Finnish does not have a category of quantifying classifiers similar to articles.
Vilkuna (1992) has written probably the most exhaustive monograph on
definite-34http://www.jkovet.fi/talvikamppanja-tasmalaake-pakkaseen/
ness and referentiality in Finnish. She concludes that those categories are rela-tive, as they require always accounting for the pragmatic or discourse-contextual knowledge of the speaker and the hearer.
However, the choice of cases for subject and object marking enables some differentiation in quantification in the case of uncountable referents as in (38) from Section 4.3.3 where the plural usage implied an unknown number of letters, or in singular in the example (58b) discussed in Section 4.3.6:
(38a) Tämä
letters-POSS.1SG
‘This box contains all of my old letters.’
(38b) Tämä
‘This box contains some of my old letters.’
(58b) Raha-a money-PAR
siirt-y-i
move-REFL-SPST
ulkomail-lle.
abroad-ALL
‘Some money moved/was moving abroad.’ or ‘The money was moving abroad.’
In the latter example, two-fold interpretation is possible. Eithersome (amount of) money was transferred abroad, orthe money was being transferred. This problem applies also to sentences were the plural Partitive subjects and objects are used indicating either that the material bound is not reached in the situation, or the quantity of subject or object is unknown, but the material bound is reached.
Following Kangasmaa-Minn (1978: 19, 27) one can compare the following pairs of sentences:
‘People died of hunger.’35 b. Ihmisiä
35This example is not unambiguous neither, and I return to it in the next subsection.
‘(Some) people died/ people were dying of hunger.’
‘The father took the children home.’
b. Isä
‘The father took some children/ was taking the children home.’
In these cases, the Partitive plural form of subject or object is the source of ambiguity between the theme-to-event homomorphism and the unspecified quan-tity of an argument. These kinds of uncertainty are usually narrowed in Finnish through the context.
4.6.3 Specifying type of frequency
Type of frequency can be overtly expressed in Finnish only with adverbial pha-rases and involves various morphological forms:
• summaric (e.g.kerran‘time.GEN, once’,kolmasti‘three times’)
• specific cycle type (e.g.kerran päivässä‘once in a day’, joka päivä ‘every-day’,päivittäin‘daily’,päivisin‘(always) in the daytime’)
• unspecific cycle type (e.g.yleensä ‘usually’, joskus ‘sometimes’, harvoin
‘rarely’,välillä‘from time to time’)
Some expressions, such askerran, belong toOSMA: (87) a. Stomil
‘Stomil pinched me, twice more.’ (S1720) b. joka
several.PL.PAR
kertoja time.PL.PAR
‘which has been being extended already several times.’ (S1033) Although some expressions seem synonymous, they are constrained as to their usage:
(88) a. Sunnutaisin on.Sundays
harjaa brush
hampaat.
teeth.PL.NOM
‘On Sundays one brushes one’s teeth.’
b. *Joka every
sunnutai Sunday
harjaa brush
hampaat.
teeth.PL.NOM
(‘Every Sunday one brushes one’s teeth.’) (Hakulinen & Karttunen 1973)
The difference betweensunnuntaisinandjoka sunnuntaiis according to Haku-linen & Karttunen (1973) analogical to the difference betweenanyandeverythat causes the usage restrictions ofjoka sunnuntaiin the generic context.
Type of frequency is not expressed by verbal forms, and as shown by Lind-stedt (1984: 24), no association betweenDOM and the type of frequency can be observed:
(89) a. Kesällä luin joka päivä venäläise-n kirja-n.
summer.ADEread.SPST.1SGevery day Russian-GENbook-GEN
‘In the summer I read through a/the Russian book every day.’
b. Kesällä luin joka päivä venäläis-tä kirja-a.
summer.ADEread.SPST.1SGevery day Russian-PARbook-PAR
‘In the summer I read/was reading some Russian book every day.’
DOMin the examples above concerns the quantity of the book(s) read. Thus, in (89a) everyday one book is read, while in (89b) only some portion of some book is read.
Let me now return to the examples (85a, 86a), which are ambiguous with reference to the type of frequency. In those examples the plural form of the subject
or object does not allow for stating how the situation of dying or carrying took place. It is not clear whether people or children participated in the situation one after another, or whether they all died/were carried once. Thus, the Total object and Nominative subject are the result of non-gradability in situation, but the inner frequency structure cannot be distinguished.
4.7 Conclusions
As shown above, many mechanisms of expressing temporality in Finnish indica-tive clauses are similar to Polish. Both languages have a very reduced system of expressing non-past temporal reference, and benefit from using lexical expres-sions of temporal localising and durative temporalisation. Neither Finnish nor Polish have a system of articles which could help in interpreting the pluractional-ity of the sentence.
Nevertheless, Polish has verbal aspect expressed with prefixes and suffixes which interact in each domain of temporality, for example, as future reference
PFV,IPFVof simultaneity or habitual.
Finnish, in contrast, has more developed system of past tenses and Paritive-Total object opposition, which to some extent resembles the aspectual mechanism of Polish, since Total object rather restricts the properties ofTSIT. Nevertheless, since DOM operates on the nominal and not on the verbal phrase, ambiguities concerning type of quantification (discrete measurement of the nominal object or ofTSIT) are hard to avoid.
Apart from DOM, the developed system of spatial cases used for marking oblique arguments seems to play some role, in particular in resultative construc-tions, so in marking the explicit material bound.
In order to examine the interactions between different levels of the Finnish and Polish systems withPVAas the key feature in mind, I turn now to the quantitative analysis of written, parallel texts.
Chapter 5
The Polish-Finnish parallel corpus
5.1 The corpus-oriented approach
All statements made here concerning the functional correlates ofPVAin Finnish are drawn on the basis of empirical material collected in a parallel corpus.
It is important to distinguish two meanings of the termcorpusin contempo-rary linguistics. The first, broader sense, CORPUS1is used with reference to text collections of a defined size and content, often considered representative for some type of language variety, like national corpora or reference corpora. In a narrow sense, aCORPUS2is a collection of texts representative with regards to a research hypothesis or research questions.
The main advantage of the corpus-oriented approach, in comparison with tra-ditional studies based on researchers’ intuition, is the higher level ofexternal va-lidity– the degree to which the results of the study can be generalised and repli-cated. Statements based on the collection of a wide range of utterances produced in the natural environment by different speakers are less likely to be subject to bias.
Secondly, Johansson (2007: 51) argues that “through corpora we can observe patterns in language which we were unaware of before or only vaguely glimpsed.
(...) this applies particularly to multilingual corpora. We can see more clearly what individual languages are alike, what they share and – perhaps eventually – what characterises language in general.”
PARALLEL CORPORA, where the original text is stored together with its trans-lations, can be particularly useful for contrastive and cross-linguistic studies. For example Xiao & McEnery (2006) examine how temporal and aspectual meanings are expressed in English–Chinese translations, and Santos (1996) uses parallel
corpora for mapping temporal categories between Portuguese and English.
In linguistic typology, as advocated for example by Dahl (2007) and Wälchli (2007), parallel corpora have become a popular and fruitful type of data.
Mihalcea & Simard (2005: 239) suggest that the translation of a text in another language can be seen as a semantic representation of that text so new methods of studying language can be applied.
In this chapter, I describe the most general qualitative and quantitative features of the corpus1 collected for the purpose of the current study, and corpus2– the sample of corpus1 containing exclusively clauses relevant to the subject of the present study. I discuss the matters of representativeness and balance as well as external factors which influenced the structure of the corpus.