Abstract
This article examines the representation of semantic vagueness in discourse as well as the connection between deontic modal meaning and third person reference through the semantics and uses of the Finnish jussive mood. The data used in the analysis come from a collection of newspaper texts and a corpus of dialectal speech. Analyzing jussive forms that give rise to various modal readings, I argue that the two poles of the deontic axis, permission and obligation, are simultaneously present, albeit highlighted to different extents, in the interpretation of a jussive clause. This binary nature of the jussive semantics reveals itself to be a discursive resource: it allows the position of the speaker and other intentional agents to be taken into account in regard to the event that is potentially taking place, thus presenting more than one point of view in the situation. The jussive mood can therefore be regarded as contributing to the dialogical dimension of language.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
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Appendix 1: Data sources
FTC – Finnish Language Text Collection – Suomen kielen tekstikokoelma. Electronic collection of written Finnish gathered by the Research Institute for the Languages in Finland, the Department of General Linguistics of the University of Helsinki and the Foreign Languages Department of the University of Joensuu. http://www.csc.fi (accessed 3 June 2016).
SA – Syntaxe Archives – Lauseopin X-arkisto. Research Institute for the Languages of Finland and School of Languages and Translation Studies, University of Turku. http://syntaxarchives.suo.utu.fi (accessed 3 June 2016).
Appendix 2: Abbreviations
- abe
abessive
- ade
adessive
- all
allative
- aux
auxiliary
- clt
clitic
- comp
complementizer
- cond
conditional
- dem
demonstrative
- ela
elative
- gen
genitive
- ill
illative
- imp
imperative
- indef
indefinite
- ind
indicative
- ine
inessive
- inf
infinitive
- ipf
imperfect
- juss
jussive
- neg
negation
- nom
nominative
- opt
optative
- part
partitive
- pass
passive
- pl
plural
- poss
possessive
- pot
potential
- prop
proper noun
- pst
past
- ptcl
particle
- ptcp
participle
- q
question marker
- rel
relative
- sg
singular
- transl
translative
©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Cooperation and coercion
- Case inflection of construct-state constructions in Dinka
- Permission and obligation intertwined: The twofold modal meaning of the Finnish jussive from a discourse perspective
- The syntax of Tagalog relative clauses
- Verb class, case, and order: A crosslinguistic experiment on non-nominative experiencers
- Morphological fusion without syntactic fusion: The case of the “verificative” in Agul
- Book Review
- Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti: The Diachrony of Negation
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Cooperation and coercion
- Case inflection of construct-state constructions in Dinka
- Permission and obligation intertwined: The twofold modal meaning of the Finnish jussive from a discourse perspective
- The syntax of Tagalog relative clauses
- Verb class, case, and order: A crosslinguistic experiment on non-nominative experiencers
- Morphological fusion without syntactic fusion: The case of the “verificative” in Agul
- Book Review
- Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti: The Diachrony of Negation