Partiaalis-refleksiiviset asennon muutosta ilmaisevat verbit suomen kielessä

• Anneli Pajunen

Avainsanat: partiaalis-refleksiiviset verbit, sanastontutkimus (ks. myös lainasanat, leksikografia, sanahistoria), semantiikka, verbit

Abstrakti

Partial-reflexive motion verbs in Finnish (englanti)

3/1998 (102)

Anneli Pajunen

Partial-reflexive motion verbs in Finnish

The article discusses class of verbs designating body-part motion or change of position in Finnish and the hierarchical structure within this class. The verbs are divided into subgroups according to the segmental division of the human body (the head and its parts, connecting parts of the head and the body, the limbs). These body parts have different ontological and motional properties accordingly, some parts being ontologically complex and movable in many ways. The head, shoulders, body and limbs move like solid objects, the face, forehead, eyebrows, lips and nose like surfaces, the eyes and mouth like cavities, and the cheeks, chest and stomach like containers. Mostly the parts of the head are ontologically complex, e.g. the mouth and eyes. The object-like parts move up and down, forwards and backwards, and can be turned or bent. The surface-like parts can be shrinked and enlarged, the cavity-like parts are opened and closed, made wider or narrower, and the container-like parts can be full or empty, big or small.

Verbs encoding these body part motions are mostly quite specific in meaning, and some of them accept only one kind of body part as an argument. The parts of the head behave most idiosyncratically. Although typically a specific verb can be exchanged for one with a more general meaning, many of the verbs discussed here lack a more general counterpart. The overall structure of this verb class is therefore special. Other motion verbs in Finnish form a deep hierarchy with many levels based on hyponymy, whereas change of state verbs form a flat hierarchy with at most two or three levels; the body part motion class has gaps in its hierarchy. Mostly the verbs encoding the motion of surfaces or facial movements lack a more general term.

The article demonstrates that the verb lexicon differs in terms of the hierarchical structure of different verb classes. Generalizations are most effectively made of those verb classes with a deep hierarchical structure because terms in the lower levels inherit properties from items in the upper levels. In the body part motion class, terms must mostly be described in full and generalizations to be made are thus minor.