No abstract

The present study discusses senses of the Finnish verbless allative-initial construction with particular attention to the allative element. I argue that the construction under investigation cannot be defined as an elliptic structure, but rather is an independent and genuinely verbless construction and that there are at least eight distinct senses for the allative element. These senses are called actor, purchaser, target group, exploiter, receiver, affected, implicated actor, and encounterer. I argue that the first two have agentive features, which is cross-linguistically extraordinary for a goal-marking morpheme, whereas the other six relate to senses which the Finnish allative case is known to have in other constructions as well. For a semantic analysis, both an intuitive categorization and an experimental method, a paraphrase test, have been applied to the data of 500 headlines.

No abstract

Semantic roles constitute one of the most notorious notions in linguistics because they have been defined in numerous ways depending on the author’s theoretical framework and goals. Typically these definitions are somehow, more or less explicitly, based on verbs and their properties. In this chapter, semantic roles are discussed from a completely different perspective; we examine genuinely verbless constructions attested in Finnish newspaper headlines. The chapter addresses three main questions: First, what kinds of constructions do not need a finite verb to express dynamic events? Second, what kind of information remains unconceptualized in verbless constructions? And finally, what are semantic roles based on if there is no verb? The goal of the chapter is to show that verbs are not needed to define semantic roles, as an array of semantic roles can be recognized even in constructions lacking a verb.