The Finnish Voice Continuum

Farkas, Judit

Alberti, Gábor

2013

P0 Philology. Linguistics / filológia, nyelvészet

PH Finno-Ugrian, Basque languages and literatures / finnugor és baszk nyelvek és irodalom

PH01 Finnish language and literature / finn nyelv és irodalom

In this paper, we apply Alberti’s (1997, 2006, 2009) Model Tau, an abstract approach to the thematic characterization of arguments, to the Finnish case system – in order to account for such strange phenomena in Finnish as the extreme frequency of the Partitive and the heterogeneous marking of the Accusative, as well as their intricate alternations with each other and the Nominative.1 The present section is devoted to an introductory illustration of the mysterious marking of Patients in Finnish. (1) below shows the Patient in object position, which can be either in the Accusative case (1a) or in another case called the Partitive (1b). We qualify the Accusative (1a) as heterogeneous in nature because at least two case-markings belong to it: the -n of common nouns and the -t of pronouns. In the Plural, again, the -t appears as the suffix of the Accusative form, but this form coincides with the Nominative form. It is, therefore, not easy to decide if the -t stands for the plural number (in this case, both the Accusative and the Nominative are marked by an empty morpheme), or if it can somehow be regarded as the same Accusative-marking suffix as in the Singular. For the Finnish object, thus, there are two cases and at least three suffixes (denoted by “-A/n/t” below in the formula of (1)).2

Conference or Workshop Item

PeerReviewed

text

http://real.mtak.hu/10264/1/kimenet.pdf

Farkas, Judit and Alberti, Gábor (2013) The Finnish Voice Continuum. In: Obi-ugor és szamojéd kutatások, magyar őstörténet Hajdú Péter és Schmidt Éva emlékkonferencia 2012, 2012, Pécs.

http://real.mtak.hu/10264/