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Subjects in Constructions – Canonical and Non-Canonical
Edited by Marja-Liisa Helasvuo and Tuomas Huumo
[Constructional Approaches to Language 16] 2015
► pp. 13–41

On the subject of subject in Finnish

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This article examines the category of subject in Finnish. Among the grammatical features examined are case marking, agreement and syntax, semantic role, its relation to other sentence elements and its semantic function as regards the sentence as a whole. One important discourse feature is whether the subject introduces a referent and whether that referent is mentioned again later in the discourse. We discuss different construction types and examine whether the alleged subjects fulfil the role of the subject as defined in cognitive grammar, i.e. which function as a clause-level trajector and as a starting point for the construal of the relationship and its participants. More generally, it is argued that the trajector does not necessarily constitute the subject of the clause-level construction. The function of an e-NP (existential NP) is proposed for such elements instead.
Published online: 14 January 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.16.02huu
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Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Carlier, Anne & Karen Lahousse
2023. Chapter 5. Presentational clefts, existentials and information structure. In Existential Constructions across Languages [Human Cognitive Processing, 76], ► pp. 139 ff. DOI logo
Huumo, Tuomas
2020. Layers of (un)boundedness: The aspectual–quantificational interplay of quantifiers and partitive case in Finnish object arguments. Linguistics 58:3 ► pp. 905 ff. DOI logo
Huumo, Tuomas
2023. Chapter 7. The Finnish existential clause. In Existential Constructions across Languages [Human Cognitive Processing, 76], ► pp. 220 ff. DOI logo

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