The Finnish plural forms HE ´THEY`, ME ´WE` and the passive construction as references to human-animal pairs in pet stories
Keywords:
ecolinguistics, Finnish, human-animal relationship, passive, pronouns, textsAbstract
The article examines three different types of bi-species personal references in biographical memoirs
written by people about their companion animals. The stories use the personal pronoun he ‘they’, which
in Standard Finnish only refers to humans, the plural first-person forms, e.g. me ‘we’, and the passive verb
forms (e.g. käydään) to refer to a pair or group of one or more humans and animals of another species.
The article contributes to the study of using these reference forms in interaction and to the debate on the
linguistic representation of the relationship between humans and other animals. Central to the pronoun
references examined is the perception of the pair or group referred to as a closely co-operating unit.
The first person plural and passive references are used in the data to denote, as in caretaker speech or
couples talk, shared activities, also even when the actual actor is only one of the members of the group.
