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Approaches to grammar for interactional linguistics
Edited by Ritva Laury, Marja Etelämäki and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
[Pragmatics 24:3] 2014
► pp. 453–476

Searching for motivations for grammatical patternings

In this article I analyze subject expression in conversational Finnish, identifying the home environments for zero and pronominal subjects in the 1st and 2nd person singular. Based on a syntactically coded database, I show that there is a clear preference, in both 1st and 2nd person, for pronominal subjects over zeros; in other words, double-marking is preferred over single-marking. This clearly contravenes the general preference for minimization or economy in person reference in conversation, as suggested by Sacks and Schegloff (1979) and Levinson (2007; see also Hacohen and Schegloff 2006). The home environments for zero and pronominal subjects are analyzed in terms of the micro-level social actions performed by participants, in order to find motivations for the choice of the form of subject. The analysis of the Finnish data shows that the choice between zero vs. pronominal subject is sensitive to features in the sequential context. It affects turn projection. The article shows that a systematic analysis of the data can provide important insights regarding global patterns. The deeper motivations that lie behind these patternings, however, cannot be understood without close microanalysis of the local contexts of subject expression.
Keywords: Person marking, Subject omission, Subject expression, Projection, Economy
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 September 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.24.3.02hel
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Laury, Ritva & Marja-Liisa Helasvuo
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Travis, Catherine E. & Rena Torres Cacoullos
2018. Discovering structure. In Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry [Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 76], ► pp. 67 ff. DOI logo
Etelämäki, Marja & Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
2017. Chapter 7. In the face of resistance. In Imperative Turns at Talk [Studies in Language and Social Interaction, 30], ► pp. 215 ff. DOI logo
Raevaara, Liisa
2017. Chapter 13. Adjusting the design of directives to the activity environment. In Imperative Turns at Talk [Studies in Language and Social Interaction, 30], ► pp. 381 ff. DOI logo
Helasvuo, Marja-Liisa & Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen
2016. Choosing between zero and pronominal subject: modeling subject expression in the 1st person singular in Finnish conversation. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 12:2 DOI logo
TORRES CACOULLOS, RENA & CATHERINE E. TRAVIS
2016. Two languages, one effect: Structural priming in spontaneous code-switching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 19:4 ► pp. 733 ff. DOI logo
Travis, Catherine E. & Amy M. Lindstrom
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