Laury2020a

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Laury2020a
BibType INCOLLECTION
Key Laury2020a
Author(s) Ritva Laury, Marja-Liisa Helasvuo, Janica Rauma
Title When an expression becomes fixed: mä ajattelin että ‘I thought that’ in spoken Finnish
Editor(s) Ritva Laury, Tsuyoshi Ono
Tag(s) EMCA, Thinking verbs, Fixed expressions, Finnish, Stance, Planning, Joint action, Complementation, Interactional linguistics, Phonetic reduction, Grammar, First person, Past tense
Publisher
Year 2020
Language English
City
Month
Journal
Volume
Number
Pages 133-166
URL Link
DOI https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.315.06lau
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title Fixed Expressions: Building language structure and social action
Chapter

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Abstract

This chapter concerns the first person past tense form of the verb ajatella ‘to think’ as a semi-fixed expression in spoken Finnish. We examine this expression in present-day conversation and in older dialect interviews, focusing on its interactional functions, the types of complements it takes, and its patterns of morphosyntactic fixedness and morphophonetic erosion in our two datasets. We show that the verb ajatella is most frequently used in its first person past tense form, mä ajattelin että [1sg + think-pst-1sg + comp] ‘I thought that’, and as has been shown for ‘think’ verbs in many other languages, it is commonly used to frame stance expressions, but another frequent use in our Finnish data is in prefacing the speaker’s expression of her own plans as well as proposals of joint action. Most commonly, mä ajattelin että is followed by clausal complements in our older data, while the complements are more diverse in the newer data, and the expression can also occur without any complements. We also show that while mä ajattelin että ‘I thought that’ occurs in our data in drastically reduced form and shows signs of morphosyntactic fixedness especially in the newer data, it cannot yet be said to have become an epistemic particle.

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