Innovative 1PL Subject Constructions in Finnish and Consequences to Object Marking Rigina Ajanki, University of Helsinki As most of the Uralic languages, Finnish makes use of suffixal person marking in conjugation and declination. The phenomenom is not an example of canonical agreement, but as Haspelmath (2013) suggests, best described in terms of two kinds of person marking, morphological and syntactic, not necessarily dependent of each other. In Colloquial Finnish, the 1PL person suffix in verbal conjugation is hardly ever employed but instead, Impersonal Construction (Finnish Passive) is applied with free 1PL subject pronoun to encode 1PL subject. Due to the replacement of 1PL conjugational construction by Impersonal construction, another previously unexisting pattern has become general in Colloquial Finnish: occurence of a Nominative Object in a construction with a Nominative Subject, not taken into account in (Sands&Campbell 2001), see Examples 1 and 2. Encoding of Finnish Object varies to the extent that Objects are either in Genitive-Accusative or in Partitive, and when there is no Nominative Subject, Object is in Nominative instead of Genitive-Accusative. The novel construction makes an exception: it is morphosyntactically unexpected as in these constructions both, Subject and Object are encoded in Nominative. The asymmetry found in novel 1PL Construction with non- canonical object marking has neither a semantic ground. The present study claims that with the emergence of the new 1PL Subject Transitive Constructions Finnish grammar has gone through a profound innovation. The data is drawn from vernacular, compared with data from dialects and from the data base of Mikael Agricola‘s works from 16th century. The study is innovative in the sense that it combines variable data to be described with modern theoretical tools of typological-functional and diachronical linguistics. The data from vernacular offers also with evidence as far as the development of the new pattern is concerned. The data of spoken language reflects the ambiguity of Impersonal Construction: depending on the context, constructions in which Impersonal conjugation is applied, can be interpreted as 1PL or Impersonal, discussed in (Helasvuo 2006). Thus the study makes also a reference to dialectal typology demonstrating how vernacular can and should be employed in diachronical typology (De Vogelaer & Guido 2012). The diachronical process is sketched also the basis of data from other Finnic languages. Namely, in other Finnic languages, Karelian and Veps, the third person pronoun ‘they‘ is added to their corresponding Impersonal Constructions, resulting to the replacement of the old 3PL suffixal person forms by Impersonal Construction. In the sister languages the rules for object marking vary, and non-canonical constructions with nominative encoded subjects and objects are found as well. Interestingly, typologically similar phenomenom is found in French: Finnish Impersonal Construction is in contemporary language employed as 1PL Construction exactly as in French (Coveney 2000). The change is though not (yet) reflected in Standard Finnish. It is, however, attested in the language of Internet (chats, blogs etc.) representing a genre characterised as written colloquial Finnish. References Coveney, A. 2000: Vestiges of nous and the 1st person plural verb in informal spoken French. Language Sciences 22. Pp. 447-481. De Vogelaer, Gunther & Seiler Guido 2012: The dialect laboratory: Introductory remarks. In De Vogelaer, Gunther & Seiler Guido (eds.) 2012: The Dialect laboratory. Dialects as a testing ground for theories of labguage change. Studies in Language Companion Series 128. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Pp. 1- 31. Haspelmath, Martin 2013: Argument indexing: a conceptual framework for the syntactic status 1 of bound person forms. To appear in: Languages across boundaries: Studies in memory of Anna Siewierska, ed. by D. Bakker & M. Haspelmath. (http://www.academia.edu/1208796/) Helasvuo, Marja-Liisa 2006. ―Passive: personal or impersonal? A Finnish perspective.‖ – Marja-Liisa Helasvuo & Lyle Campbell (eds.), Grammar from the human perspective: case, space and person in Finnish. CILT 277. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Pp. 233–255. Sands, Kristina & Lyle Campbell 2001: Non-canonical subjects and objects in Finnish. In Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, R.M.W.Dixon, Masayuki Onishi (ed.) 2001: Non-canonical subjects and objects. Typological Studies in Language 46. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Pp. 251-318. Main data sources: Archive of Morphology, University of Helsinki Helsingin puhekielen pitkittäiskorpus –aineistohanke. University of Helsinki. Leader of the project: Hanna Lappalainen. Mikael Agricolan teosten tieteellinen editio ja morfosyntaktinen tietokanta. University of Turku. Leader of the project: Kaisa Häkkinen. Conservative pattern, Standard Finnish, 1PL Construction SUBJECT.NOM VERB-PERSON OBJECT-GEN-ACC 1) (Me-Ø) osta-mme auto-n. (we-NOM) buy-1PL car-GEN-ACC ‗We will buy a car.‘ Innovative pattern, Colloquial Finnish, 1PL‘ Construction SUBJECT.NOM VERB-IMPERSON OBJECT-NOM 2) Me-Ø oste-taan auto-Ø. We-NOM buy-IMPERS car-NOM ‗We will buy a car.‘ 2 COMING and GOING: Passive voices in the Alps Marco Angster, Livio Gaeta - Università di Torino Language contact, which has gained a central role in the research on grammaticalization over the last years thanks to Heine & Kuteva (2005)‘s contributions, lies in the background of this paper on the passive voice in some heavily endangered language varieties found in the Walser communities of Piedmont and Aosta Valley. The peculiar character of these dialects, which might also be taken as a prototypical example of an Alpine Sprachbund (cf. Seiler 2004), can be seen in the highly complex voice system, only partially understandable in terms of contact with Italian or other Romance varieties. In these dialects, the passive construction containing the venitive auxiliary typical of the rest of the Upper Alemannic dialects (1) (cf. Russ 1990: 388) stands in competition with the construction containing the andative auxiliary (2)-(3) (cf. Angster 2004-05): (1) wia chun das ggmachut-s? how comes this[N] make:PSTPTCP-N:SG:NOM ‗How is this made?‘ (2) z ròt chappe éscht en der letschte kanget erettent-s vòm the red cap[N] is in the last gone save:PSTPTCP-N:SG:NOM by-SG:DAT jeger hunter ‗Little Red Ridinghood is lastly saved by the hunter‘. [Cappuccetto Rosso è infine salvata dal cacciatore] (3) e chatzò éscht kchéem-e én vòn der fänschtrò a cat[F] is come:PSTPTCP-F:SG:NOM in from the window woa ésch ni kanget gschlossen-é where is not gone close:PSTPTCP-F:SG:NOM ‗A cat has entered from the window which has not been closed‘. [Un gatto era entrato da una finestra che non aveva chiuso] The sentences correspond only partially to the Italian input sentences which had to be translated by the speakers as shown by (3). Notice that the andative construction forces a different form of the past participle (strong, inflected) of the main verb (4) from that required by the perfect construction (weak, uninflected) (5): (4) de naf ésch kanget brochn-e vó Johannes the bowl[F] is gone broken-F:SG:NOM by Johannes ‗The bowl has been broken by John‘. [La scodella è stata rotta da Giovanni] (5) Johannes hät brochet de naf Johannes has broken the bowl ‗John has broken the bowl‘. [Giovanni ha rotto la scodella] At any rate, the andative construction only occurs in the perfect form, in which it competes with 3 the BE- passive, while in the present only the venitive construction is found besides that containing BE (6-7): (6) z bant éscht khakkót-s vóm sendék the ribbon[N] is cut:PSTPTCP-N:SG:NOM by:DEF mayor ‗The ribbon is cut by the mayor‘. [Il nastro è / viene tagliato dal sindaco] (7) z fleisch chént kchouft-s vó Johannes the meat[N] comes buy:PSTPTCP-N:SG:NOM by Johannes ‗The meat is bought by John‘. [La carne viene comprata da Giovanni] (8) z bant geit khakkót-s vóm sendék the ribbon goes cut:PSTPTCP-N:SG:NOM by:DEF mayor ‗The ribbon has to be cut by the mayor‘. [Il nastro va tagliato dal sindaco] The andative construction in the present (8) basically displays a modal interpretation directly corresponding to the Italian input sentence. However, this modal meaning is completely absent in the perfect forms mentioned above in (2-4). This highly complex picture comes from a peculiar elaboration of the different passive constructions that the speakers had at their disposal in such a multilingual speech context, in which language contact did not simply lead to calquing. References Angster, Marco (2004-05), La perifrasi tue + infinito nel titsch di Gressoney, BA-Thesis, University of Turin. Heine, Bernd und Tania Kuteva (2005), Language Contact and Grammatical Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russ, Charles (1990), ―High Alemannic‖, in Charles Russ (ed.), The Dialects of Modern German, London: Routledge. Seiler, Guido (2004), ―Gibt es einen Alpensprachbund?‖, in Elvira Glaser et al. (eds.), Alemannisch im Sprachvergleich, Stuttgart: Steiner, 485-493. 4 Semi-direct speech in Rtau Anton Antonov & Guillaume Jacques (CNRS-INALCO-EHESS, CRLAO) This paper deals with ‗semi-direct‘ speech (Aikhenvald, 2008), also called ‗hybrid‘ in the context of Tibetan languages (Tournadre, 2008), in Rtau (locally known as rəsɲəske). Rtau is a poorly documented Rgyalrongic language (Sino-Tibetan) spoken in Rtau county, Sichuan province, China. The data presented here is based on ongoing fieldwork by the authors. In Rtau, there are two main ways of reporting what someone else has said, direct speech (DS) and semi-direct speech (SDS). The authors have been unable to ascertain the existence of any other type of reported speech, such as indirect speech (IS) which is reported to be unattested in Tibetan languages as well (Tournadre, 2008). Unlike direct speech, semi-direct speech is framed by a converbal form and an appropriately conjugated form of the reporting verb jə ‗say‘ (cf. 1a through 1e). Furthermore, SDS is used not only with verbs of reporting, but also with some verbs denoting cognitive activities such as ntshə ‗think‘ (cf.