Onko jäädä-verbin paikallissijamääritteen tulosijalla semanttista motivaatiota?

• Tuomas Huumo

Avainsanat: fiktiivinen dynaamisuus, kognitiivinen kielitiede, paikallissijat, verbit

Abstrakti

How fictive dynamicity motivates directional case marking in the locative argument of jäädä 'remain' (englanti)

4/2005 (109)

HOW FICTIVE DYNAMICITY MOTIVATES DIRECTIONAL CASE MARKING IN THE LOCATIVE ARGUMENT OF JD REMAIN

A fundamental observation of cognitive linguistics is that language reflects our cognitive bias towards dynamism (Talmy 2000), in that we often use semantically dynamic elements when referring to static situations. The writer refers to this phenomenon as fictive dynamicity. Cognitive linguists generally agree that expressions incorporating this phenomenon reflect a dynamic conceptualisation of a static situation and that this arises because the conceptualiser selects a certain perspective and approaches the situation directionally. The best-known examples of fictive dynamicity are expressions of fictive motion (e.g. the phrase The road goes from A to B), but fictive dynamicity also manifests itself at more abstract, grammatical levels of language.

The article examines the semantic motivation underlying the directional (to) case marking of the locative argument of the Finnish verb jd remain (e.g. Hn j+i koulu+un [s/he remain+PAST.3SG school+ILLATIVE] s/he remained at school). The meaning would seem to indicate no change, and so the verb might be expected to take a static argument instead of the illative case. However, the writer argues that the meaning of jd in fact indicates a fictive change which manifests itself as a deviation from a projected course of events, and that this fictive change motivates the directional case marking in its arguments.

In general, the selection of a locative case is motivated by the nature of the situation designated, i.e. the static cases designate a setting or a location where the participants are continuously situated, whereas the directional cases designate a source or a goal of motion (or other kind of change). In Finnish, however, it has often been observed that many verbs require their locative modifiers to take a directional case even though the situation they designate includes neither motion nor a change that would motivate the use of these cases. By contrast, similar meanings are conveyed in many Indo-European languages through the use of semantically static expressions instead.

The first part of the article summarises the conclusions of earlier studies, and the writer argues that even though expressions with directional cases may be static from a strictly spatial point of view, many of them nevertheless indicate a change that takes place at a more abstract level, e.g. in internal states or perceptive-cognitive relationships. It is argued that such dynamic meanings are the motivation for the use of the directional cases. The writer then examines the semantics of jd more closely, going through its dictionary meanings and showing that in fact many of these meanings are dynamic (e.g. changes of state). He also compares jd with its straightforwardly static counterpart pysy stay, and shows that the latter is actually a static verb proper, whereas jd is more dynamic. It is also demonstrated that jd is actually a punctual verb which only profiles the inceptive phase of a state and not the continuous state itself (presence in a location, state, etc.). This is clear in the change-of-state reading of the verb but less apparent in its static reading. However, the writer demonstrates that even in the latter case, remaining is itself a punctual relationship, though the state that temporally precedes it may be similar to the state that temporally follows it. Furthermore, jd contrasts the inceptive phase of a state with a projected course of events in which such inception would not have occurred but the entity would have left its location. This represents the inceptive phase of a state as a deviation from a projected course of events, i.e. it limits the designated situation by discounting any alternative development. The writer argues that this deviation creates a (fictively) dynamic meaning for the sentence in question and is also the main motivation for the use of the to cases in the locative arguments.

Tuomas Huumo