Mikael Agricolan teosten päin-partikkeli

• Heidi Merimaa

Abstrakti

The particle päin in the works of Mikael Agricola (englanti)

4/2007 (111)

THE PARTICLE PIN IN THE WORKS OF MIKAEL AGRICOLA

The article examines the use of the particle pin towards, from (the direction of), in (the neighbourhood of) in the sixteenth-century works of Mikael Agricola. Particle is here used in the sense of words other than verbs or nominals. Agricolas works contain 133 pin particles. The works do not include any instances of pin as an adverb or adposition with a partitive complement. Instead, most of the instances of pin are in the form of other types of adpositional particle. Their complement is normally a nominal in the illative case, and there are also a few instances of a local-case adverb. Of particular interest is the fact that the particle pin is also used to form constructions with complements in the genitive and nominative cases. These instances of pin can be regarded as adpositions or adpositional particles. The reason for genitive complements could be that Agricola translated them from prepositional structures in the source texts for his translations and, in doing so, followed the model of a typical adpositional structure, where the complement is in the genitive. There are also several other alternative explanations: literary Finnish was still in its infancy; the texts were influenced by the pre-existing tradition of old ecclesiastical Finnish; and there were other writers involved in Agricolas works.

The pin particles are used to express direction, and they function as modifiers of spatial expressions. The meaning and use of some of Agricolas pin particles can also be discerned clearly by examining the model used in the source texts: the particle is used to express, for instance, the giving of something (to someone), in the manner of the Swedish preposition till. In contrast to Modern Finnish, Agricolas texts also use the pin particle, albeit rarely, in conjunction with the adverb hamaan unto, until to mean up to/as far as (something).

The use of the particle pin in the New Testament has declined: in Agricolas New Testament there were 17 such particles, but in the 1992 New Testament their number had decreased to just eight. In the current version, Agricolas pin is often replaced by the adposition kohti towards or by a local-case noun.

Although the particle pin normally expresses direction, both in Agricolas language and in Modern Finnish, dictionary data indicates that pin has fairly recently undergone grammaticalisation from a concrete, spatial expression of direction to an expression of the direction of a development or change. Indeed, this more abstract use is not only absent from Agricolas works but is not yet mentioned even in the Dictionary of Modern Finnish. On the other hand, it is also evident that pin could take on a more grammatical form in Agricolas language than in Modern Finnish, as it was used to form constructions with a genitive complement and a grammatical meaning.

Heidi Merimaa