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Tuomas Huumo
How fictive dynamicity motivates aspect marking: The riddle of the Finnish quasi-resultative construction
Keywords: aspect, subjectivity, case marking
This article studies fictive dynamicity as a factor motivating aspectual case marking in Finnish. In Finnish transitive sentences aspect is marked with the morphological case of the object: the restrictive object is used in sentences with a resultative meaning, whereas the partitive object is used in sentences indicating either atelicity, irresultativity, or progressivity. Interestingly, however, the restrictive object is also used in so-called quasi-resultative sentences, the aspectual meaning of which is atelic. These typically express a static physical location, perception, or cognition. In this article I argue that the use of the restrictive object in quasi-resultative sentences reflects the telic features of the conceptualization used to construct the representation of the atelic situation, where the atelic situation is represented as the result of a fictive change. This study thus extends the concept of fictive dynamicity to cover phenomena related to linguistic aspect.
Cognitive Linguistics, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0936-5907
Volume: 16, 02/2005
Pages: 113 - 144