Demonstratives in Interaction

With or without articles? A comparison of article-like determiners in Estonian and Finnish

“…It is well known that certain determiners, especially demonstrative pronouns and the numeral 'one' , often develop into grammatical articles through the process of grammaticalization (e.g., Heine & Kuteva 2006). This trend has been observed in Finnish (Laury 1997;Juvonen 2005) and also in Estonian (Pajusalu 1997;Pajusalu 2000). Yet, there are no studies analyzing the use of article-like determiners in parallel in present-day Estonian and Finnish, despite the fact that these languages are closely related and some of their determiners are very similar.…”

“…However, linguistic devices for marking the (pragmatic) definiteness or indefiniteness of an NP still exist, e.g., case selection, word order, or determiners (see Chesterman 1991 for Finnish;Pajusalu 1997 for Estonian). For example, the use of different pronouns as determiners in Estonian (e.g., üks 'one' , see 'this') and in Finnish (e.g., se 'it' , yks(i) 'one') has gained more attention recently (see Laury 1997;Pajusalu 2009). Determiners are a class of words that accompany NPs to indicate that the referent of an NP is identifiable.…”

“…Other researchers say that tämä is mostly used for referents which are identifiable on the basis of the utterance they belong to, while tuo is identifiable in a larger context (Etelämäki 2006;Priiki 2017). While some researchers claim that there are two definite determiners, se and tämä, that compete for the status of the definite article in Finnish (Juvonen 2000), others see adnominal tämä instead as a marker of prominence and se as a definite article (Laury 1997).…”

“…As of now, researchers have proposed interactional explanations for usage of Finnish demonstratives instead of a spatial distance-based explanation (Laury 1997;Seppänen 1998;Etelämäki 2006;Priiki 2017). It is stated that tämä is used when the referent is in the sphere of the speaker, tuo places the referent outside of the speaker's sphere, and se is used for referents in the addressee's sphere (Laury 1997: 59).…”

Demonstrative adjectives in spoken Finnish: Informational sufficiency and the speaker-addressee dynamic

“…Traditionally, tämä 'this' is regarded as proximal, tuo 'that' as distal, and se 'it, that' as neutral or proximal from the perspective of the addressee (Larjavaara 1990, Juvonen 2000. According to Laury (1997)'s work on the Finnish demonstratives, tämä 'this' is used to refer to referents in the speaker's own sphere, se 'it, that' for referents in the addressee's sphere, and tuo 'that' for referents outside the speaker's sphere (Laury 1997:89). The -lainen suffix adds the meaning 'like NP, similar to NP, resembling NP' (Ikola 1986:91).…”