A case in search of an independent life

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.

Semantic roles and verbless constructions

“…However, in many languages, static events, or rather states, such as existence or possession, can be expressed without (copula) verbs (see Payne 1997: 113ff for a discussion). However, our data clearly shows that some dynamic event types can also be expressed without verbs (see Västi 2011aVästi , 2011bVästi , 2012 for senses of two specific constructions; see also Vahtera 2009for a comparison between Swedish and Finnish, and Kopotev 2007a, 2007b for a comparison between Russian and Finnish). Dynamic events are defined here as involving concrete motion or some kind of abstract change, which is typically coded by verbs.…”