Fictive dynamicity, nominal aspect, and the Finnish copulative construction

Abstract

The article presents a cognitive linguistic study of fictive dynamicity, nominal aspect and the case marking of the predicate adjective (PA) in Finnish copulative clauses. The term fictive dynamicity refers to the dynamic construal of a static situation, a classic example being fictive motion as illustrated by The highway goes from Tartu to Tallinn, where a static situation is referred to by a motion verb and directional locative adpositions. The term nominal aspect refers to the aspectual meaning of the sentence that is based on an incremental participation of a nominal referent. For instance in She was mowing the lawn the activity proceeds gradually along the referent of the object and reaches its endpoint when the whole referent has been affected. In the Finnish copulative construction, fictive dynamicity manifests itself as incremental scanning of the subject referent and as distributive attribution of a quality (indicated by the PA) to its components. The received view in Finnish linguistics assumes that the PA is in the nominative if the subject is a singular count noun, and in the partitive if the subject is a mass noun or a plural. Semantically, the nominative PA attributes a quality to the referent of the subject holistically, whereas the partitive attributes it in a distributive way to the (conceived) components of the referent. I show that this distributive meaning often gives rise to the incremental conceptualization of the subject and results in dynamic nominal aspect. The data discussed consist of copulative clauses with different kinds of subjects (mass, count, plural). The article also includes a comparison between the PA and other relevant uses of the partitive case, including objects and existential subjects. Special attention is paid to copulative clauses with an action noun subject and the complicated interaction of the verbal and nominal features of the action noun in the aspectual meaning of the sentence.