Is there a future for the Finnish comitative?

This paper sets out to question the claims made in literature about the synonymy of the Finnish comitative case -ine and the construction with the postposition kanssa, suggesting that the former is giving way to the latter. A contemporary newspaper corpus shows that the comitative is still a productive case in Finnish and that the functional domains of the case and the postposition kanssa differ considerably: each of them has functions that the other does not have, and the distributions of their common functions are notably different. This shows that the comitative case and the postposition kanssa are not replaceable each with the other and thus, they are not synonymic.

Published online: 28 September 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.99.05sir