Kuka pelkää, ketä pelottaa : Nykysuomen tunneverbien kielioppia ja semantiikkaa

Abstract

On the syntax and semantics of emotive verbs in present-day Finnish Mari Siiroinen, University of Helsinki (FIN)

The thesis deals with the syntax and semantics of emotive verbs in presentday Finnish. In particular, it discusses 198 central emotive verbs. The theoretical framework is that of cognitive linguistics (Langacker, Lakoff). The discussion of verb semantics and syntactic behaviour of verbs owes much to the ideas of William Croft.

The thesis is divided into two sections; the first section discusses emotive verbs as lexemes, and the second section examines the usage of selected verbs based on the evidence from machine-readable Finnish text corpora. It is found that Finnish emotive verbs should be classified into four syntactic- semantic types: inchoative verbs, activity verbs, stative verbs and causative verbs. Causative verbs are further subcategorized into those used in the transitive construction and those used in the emotive causative construction. Morphologically, causative verbs are derived from nouns, directly or via inchoative verbs. The emotive causative construction has the special feature of an experiencer argument that is syntactically in between subject and object. In the detailed discussion of the usage of the verbs pelätä (‘fear’) and pelottaa (‘be afraid’) it is noted that pelätä often occurs without an object or with a complement object, while pelottaa has both normal causative usage and emotive causative usage. Journalistic language seems to favour the causative usage of pelottaa, while emotive causative usage is more frequent in literary style.

It is found that the factors influencing the choice of pelätä or pelottaa, or intransitive or transitive verb of astonishment, include discourse topic, empathy and vantage-point. The chosen verb will be the one that will take the discourse topic as the subject. An interesting exception is pelottaa, which is used in the emotive causative construction when the discourse topic is the referent who experiences the emotion, whose vantage-point is used and to whom empathy is felt. This is typical when the experiencer is 1st person, or even 3rd person in free indirect style in literary texts.

-