Abstract
The article studies a subtype of the Finnish generalizing relative clause, referred to as the proverb formula. A generalizing relative clause refers to any person who fills the described condition. The proverb formula is used frequently in the Finnish translations of the Bible in the Book of Proverbs. The study examines two aspects that vary in this structure in Finnish editions from 1642 to 1992: the head pronoun of the relative clause and the order of the relative clause and the main clause. In the oldest of the studied translations, the most frequent one variant or the proverb formula begins with the relative clause, and the relative clause head in the main clause is a personal pronoun (hän). For the order of the structure, a clear model is found in the source texts of the translation. In later editions, personal pronoun heads were eliminated. Interestingly, they are not replaced with demonstrative heads, which would follow the most frequent proverb formula structure in Finnish vernacular and would also be recommenced by grammar guides. Instead, a variant with omission of the head pronoun gains in frequency. Variations within the proverb formula increase when the order with the main clause preceding the relative clause gains in frequency. The preference for omission of the head pronouns is not easily explainable. The article proposes that this variant was a conscious stylistic choice for solemn, biblical language.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Syntactic alternations and socio-stylistic constraints: the case of asyndetic complementation in the history of Spanish
- Changes in the proverb formula in Finnish Bibles from 1642 to 1992
- Tracking subject position change in U.S. Southwest Spanish: what 19th and 20th century Tucson newspapers tell us
- The rationalisation of vowel diacritic spelling in Early Modern English (1500–1700)
- Language contact in historical documents: the identification and co-occurrence of Egyptian transfer features in Greek documentary papyri
- Book Reviews
- Florian Dolberg: Agreement in language contact: Gender development in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Studies in Language Companion Series 208)
- Merja, Stenroos & Kjetil V. Thengs: Records of real people: linguistic variation in Middle English local documents (Advances in historical sociolinguistics 11)
- Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson: Voices past and present – Studies of involved, speech-related and spoken texts. In honor of Merja Kytö. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97)
- Laura Wright: The multilingual origins of Standard English (Topics in English Linguistics 107)
- Robert McColl Millar: A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland
- Corrigendum
- Talking like a servant: What nineteenth century novels can tell us about the social history of the language
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Syntactic alternations and socio-stylistic constraints: the case of asyndetic complementation in the history of Spanish
- Changes in the proverb formula in Finnish Bibles from 1642 to 1992
- Tracking subject position change in U.S. Southwest Spanish: what 19th and 20th century Tucson newspapers tell us
- The rationalisation of vowel diacritic spelling in Early Modern English (1500–1700)
- Language contact in historical documents: the identification and co-occurrence of Egyptian transfer features in Greek documentary papyri
- Book Reviews
- Florian Dolberg: Agreement in language contact: Gender development in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Studies in Language Companion Series 208)
- Merja, Stenroos & Kjetil V. Thengs: Records of real people: linguistic variation in Middle English local documents (Advances in historical sociolinguistics 11)
- Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson: Voices past and present – Studies of involved, speech-related and spoken texts. In honor of Merja Kytö. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97)
- Laura Wright: The multilingual origins of Standard English (Topics in English Linguistics 107)
- Robert McColl Millar: A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland
- Corrigendum
- Talking like a servant: What nineteenth century novels can tell us about the social history of the language