The Finnish Noun Phrase
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Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Corso di Laurea Specialistica in Scienze del Linguaggio The Finnish Noun Phrase Relatore: Prof.ssa Giuliana Giusti Correlatore: Prof. Guglielmo Cinque Laureanda: Lena Dal Pozzo Matricola: 803546 ANNO ACCADEMICO: 2006/2007 A mia madre Table of contents Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………….…….…… III Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………........ V Abbreviations ……………………………………………………………………………VII 1. Word order in Finnish …………………………………………………………………1 1.1 The order of constituents in the clause …………………………………………...2 1.2 Word order and interpretation .......……………………………………………… 8 1.3 The order of constituents in the Nominal Expression ………………………… 11 1.3.1. Determiners and Possessors …………………………………………………12 1.3.2. Adjectives and other modifiers …………………………………………..… 17 1.3.2.1 Adjectival hierarchy…………………………………………………………23 1.3.2.2 Predicative structures and complements …………………………………26 1.3.3 Relative clauses …………………………………………………………….... 28 1.4 Conclusions ............……………………………………………………………. 30 2. Thematic relations in nominal expressions ……………………………………….. 32 2.1 Observations on Argument Structure ………………………………….……. 32 2.1.1 Result and Event nouns…………………………………………………… 36 2.2 Transitive nouns ………………………………………………………………... 38 2.2.1 Compound nouns ……………….……………………………………... 40 2.2.2 Intransitive nouns derived from transitive verbs …………………… 41 2.3 Passive nouns …………………………………………………………………… 42 2.4 Psychological predicates ……………………………………………………….. 46 2.4.1 Psych verbs ……………………………………………………………….. 46 2.4.2 Psych nouns ……………..…………………………………………………52 2.5 Conclusions ……………………………………………………………………... 55 3. The highest layer of the noun phrase ……………………………………………… 56 3.1 The Finnish case system ………………………………………………………… 58 3.2 Lack of articles? ………………………………………………………………….. 68 I 3.2.1 Demonstratives as referential operators ………………………………… 71 3.2.2 Case alternation as the expression of definiteness ………………………76 3.2..2.1 Partitive/accusative case alternation and boundedness ……………78 3.2.3 Proper names ………………………………………………………………. 80 3.3 Conclusions ………………………………………………………………………. 82 4. The Possessive system …………………………………………………………….. 84 4.1 About Possessors hierarchy and theta-role …………………………………... 84 4.2 Possessive pronouns in standard Finnish ……………………………………. 89 4.2.1 Parallelisms with the clause ……………………………………………….. 93 4.2.2 Crosslinguistic observations ………………………………………………... 96 4.3 Possessive pronouns in colloquial Finnish …………………………………….100 4.4 Inalienable possession and kinship relations ……………..…………………. .104 4.5 Possessive copular constructions ……………………………………………….108 4.6 Conclusions ……………………………………………………………………….111 5. Quantifiers ……………………………………………………………………………113 5.1 An overview of the data ……………………………………………………….. 113 5.2 Quantifiers and partitive case …………………………………………………. 120 5.3 Quantity Nouns, Quantity Adjectives and Quantifiers in Finnish ……..…. 122 5.3.1 Quantity Nouns ………………………………………………………..…. 123 5.3.2 Quantity Adjectives …………………………………………………..…... 126 5.3.3 Quantifiers ……………………………………………………………….... 127 5.3.4 Numerals ………………………………………………………………….. 131 5.4Conclusions ………………………………………………………………………. 132 6. The competence of partitive/accusative object alternation in Finnish-Italian bilingual speakers …………………………………………………………………... 135 6.1 Theoretical background and expected results …………………………….... 135 6.2 The test ………………………………………………………………………….. 138 6.3 The analysis …………………………………………………………………….. 140 II 6.4 Conclusions …………………………………………………………………….. 144 Appendix: the test ............................................................................................................146 References ………………………………………………………………………………. 155 III Acknowledgements I am pleased to acknowledge the many people who supported me during these months. I am deeply indebted to my supervisor Professor Giuliana Giusti, for having been an excellent teacher and for having introduced me to linguistics. She has provided me with constant guidance, insightful comments, and encouragement throughout the course of this work. I also thank her for going through several versions of this thesis and suggesting useful criticisms, with endless patience and generous willingness. I am also indebted to my co-supervisor Professor Guglielmo Cinque, for his kindness and helpfulness. Our conversations have been interesting and important for my work in many ways and have inspired new observations and considerations about Finnish language. I owe a debt of gratitude to my dear aunt Tuula Stjernvall, my friends Katia Brunetto and Reeta Laamanen, and the Finnish native speakers who patiently answered to my last-minute doubts about grammaticality, supporting me out of friendship and providing essential help for the data presented here. The teaching experience for the Finno-Italian Association of Florence has been of primary interest from both an academic and a personal point of view and have inspired the last chapter, which also benefited from discussions with Anne Tamm at the University of Florence. I am very grateful to my family, who has always supported me in spite of the occurred delay and whose encouragement has been precious to carry out this work. Finally, I would thank my study colleagues and friends Andrea, Annalisa, Elisa, Giulia, Silvia, with whom it has been a true joy to live in Venice, for keeping me grounded and sane, with a special gratitude towards Giulia for her unforgettable kindness and for having helped to put large problems into perspective during our discussions, breaks and meals. I thank Pietro, for his III moral support and for having always encouraged me with tender affection during these months. I would also thank all my friends and all the persons that I haven’t mentioned and who, directly or indirectly, have contributed to this final result being an essential part of my academic and personal background. IV Abstract In this thesis we investigate various issues related to the Finnish noun phrase with the main goal of describing the observed phenomenon in the framework of generative grammar. Hence, we assume, as often proposed in the literature (Abney 1987, Cinque 1994, Giusti 1993, 1996 and 2006, and many others), that the noun phrase has three main “layers”, represented in the projection in (1): (1) DP 3) Complementation Area Spec D’ D° AgrP 2) Inflectional Area Spec Agr’ Agr° NP 1) NP-shell Lexical Area In the Lexical Area the thematic relations are established and theta-roles assigned, in the Inflectional Area modifiers are merged in a hierarchical order and finally, the referential features of the noun phrase are evaluated in the Complementation Area (cf. Giusti 2007). The paper is organized as follows: in the first chapter we present the linear order of the noun and its modifiers and we make some parallelisms with the order found in clause. Starting from the evident observation that all nominal modifiers are in adnominal position, we will observe that both the adjectival hierarchy proposed by Cinque (1994) and the hierarchy for nominal modifiers of Greenberg’s Universal 20 (discussed in Cinque 2005) are respected in Finnish. The second chapter concerns the thematic relations in nominal expressions. Finnish, being an agglutinative language with a rich inflectional morphology, is an intriguing ground for some observations on case-assignment and theta- V roles, among others, the (im)possibility of two prenominal genitives and elative case. In the third chapter we concentrate on the lexical items that can modify a nominal expression. After the Finnish case system, we present, on the lines of Laury (1991) and Juvonen (2000), the possible process of grammaticalization that the demonstrative se ‘it/this/that’ is undergoing. Then, we go through demonstratives, case alternation, word order, pronouns, and of course proper names all of which provide the noun phrase with referential features. The fourth chapter is devoted to the possessive system. The possessive constructions poses several intriguing questions on their structure and we will analyze data of both standard and colloquial Finnish, assuming that the two “register” have different and independent possessive constructions and applying Cardinaletti’s (1998) bipartition into weak and strong pronouns. In the fifth chapter we deal with quantifiers and we apply the classification proposed by Giusti & Leko (2001, 2005) to Finnish, which provides further evidence for the classification in Quantity Nouns, Quantity Adjectives and Quantifiers. Throughout the thesis, we will observe that partitive case occurs under various circumstances (as related to indefiniteness, in quantified expressions, assigned by a set of verbs) and the sixth and last chapter presents some data provided by a test on object case alternation in Finnish/Italian bilinguals with particular reference to the (un)boundedness features of the predicate. VI Abbreviations NOM nominative GEN genitive ACC accusative PART partitive ESS essive TRANS translative INE inessive ELA elative ILL illative ADE adessive ALL allative ABL ablative ABE abessive COM comitative INSTR instructive 1,2,3,etc. 1st, 2nd, 3rd person, etc. SG singular PL plural 1POSSsg/pl 1st person singular/plural possessive pronoun 2POSSsg/pl 2nd person singular/plural possessive pronoun 3POSS 3rd person singular/plural possessive pronoun PRES present tense PAST past tense VII PRTC participle AG.PRTC agentive participle PRTC.PASS passive participle PRTC.II second participle INF infinitive 3INF third infinitive AUX auxiliary VIII 1. Word order in Finnish Finnish is a language