Suomen infiniittisten adjunktien temporaalinen tulkinta

• Urpo Nikanne

Avainsanat: aikasuhteet, infinitiivirakenteet, morfologia, semantiikka, syntaksi

Abstrakti

Temporal interpretation of non-finite verbal adjuncts in Finnish (englanti)

3/1997 (101)

Urpo Nikanne

TEMPORAL INTERPRETATION OF NON-FINITE VERBAL ADJUNCTS IN FINNISH

In the article the writer discusses the semantic relations of non-finite verbal adjuncts in Finnish. The form of these adjuncts differs according to the morphological structure of the infinitive or the participle. The semantics of the adjuncts studied are somewhat similar to those of the English adjuncts 'in order to do something', 'after doing something', 'while doing something', 'doing something', 'by doing something' and 'without doing something'. (The English constructions do, of course, differ semantically in many points of detail from the Finnish ones.)

Jackendoff (1987) assumes that the conceptual (= semantic) representation of a sentence includes a temporal tier, the T-tier. This was further developed by Nikanne (1990) into a description of the temporal Aktionsart properties of a sentence. In the present article, the writer suggests another T-tier, the CT-tier. The CT-tier is a schematic temporal tier that is shared by all situations expressed in a complex sentence; in a sense it is the temporal tier of the 'micro universe of discourse' of the complex sentence. In the analyses of the adjuncts, the individual T-tiers of the situations expressed by the non-finite verbal adjunct and the matrix sentence are separately related to the CT-tier using the operators * ('is included in'), = ('is equal to') and ** ('is not included in').