Anglicising Finnish complementation? Examining the rakastan puhua (‘I love to speak’) structure in present-day Finnish

Abstract

The paper addresses the question as to whether the complementation system of Finnish is currently undergoing a change which will ultimately lead to Finnish syntax recognising rakastan puhua (‘I love to talk/speak’) as a valid instantiation of the syntactic structure in question in addition to the traditional construction rakastan puhumista (‘I love talking/speaking’). At present, the former type is distinctly a marked type of expression whereas the latter variant is equally unmarked. The paper argues that while the emergence of the new type in Finnish may be attributable to the influence of the corresponding infinitival construction in English via translation, this is so only to some extent, and that the change Finnish syntax is undergoing in this respect is mainly due to some sociolinguistic and ideological considerations whereby users of the construction can identify themselves as belonging to certain subcultures or subgroups of speakers.