Ilmaus "X on sellainen että Y" suomen puhekielessä

• Kaija Kuiri

Avainsanat: predikatiivi, sivulauseet, syntaksi

Abstrakti

The expression "X on sellainen että Y" in spoken Finnish (englanti)

3/1999 (103)

Kaija Kuiri (University of Tampere, Dept. of Finnish and General Linguistics; [e-mail])

THE EXPRESSION 'X ON SELLAINEN ETT Y' IN SPOKEN FINNISH

The article examines the expression x on sellainen ett y ('x is such that y'; x = nominal, y = clause) in spoken Finnish. The material used consists of dialectal speech and young people's speech and has been collected by interview. The writer also conducted a test for university students on the use of this expression.

The expression x on sellainen ett y is an established syntactical construction which has two main uses. On the one hand, it can be used to characterise and classify the referent of x with an entire clause. In this case the cataphoric pronoun sellainen 'such' reserves a place for the complement in the structure of the first clause, which is then filled by the content of the following ett clause. The ett clause is by nature descriptive and does not refer directly to a state of affairs in the outside world. In terms of its illocutionary force, the expression is mainly a categorising statement.

In the other use of the expression, the ett clause is more important in its meaning, and the type of illocutionary force it is given can vary. The speaker begins with x on sellainen only as a causal description for the opinion, action or act expressed in the ett clause. The dividing line between the two functions is not fixed, but the causal interpretation generally requires that the referent of x in the x on sellainen clause does not have a central role in the action or act expressed by the ett clause.

The expression x on sellainen ett y appears often in spoken Finnish. It does also appear in written Finnish, but this study has examined only the spoken language. In speech it is one of several similar expressions in which the pronoun sellainen (or semmoinen) has been or is being grammaticalized to become an integral part of a syntactic construction.