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- Title
Relative clauses in spatial and narrative contexts in Estonian, Finnish, and Russian.
- Authors
Pajusalu, Renate; Reile, Maria; Hint, Helen; Nahkola, Tiina; Taremaa, Piia
- Abstract
In this article, the similarities and differences in the usage of relative clauses in Estonian, Finnish, and Russian in the overall framework of referential devices are studied. The data come from two experimental settings: "Houses" and "Narratives". In "Houses", the participants' task was to describe and compare previously defined houses to the experimenter while looking out of a window. In "Narratives", a picture-sequencebased narrative elicitation method was used to collect short and coherent spoken narratives. Collected data were coded for referential devices, including bare NPs, demonstratives, personal pronouns, zero reference, and relative clauses. In "Houses", the Russian data had the largest amount of relative clauses and the smallest amount of demonstrative pronouns; Finnish had the smallest number of relative clauses and the largest number of demonstratives. In the Estonian data, the frequencies of demonstratives and relative clauses were between those of Russian and Finnish. In "Narratives", the frequency of relative clauses was approximately the same in Estonian, Finnish, and Russian. This suggests that these three languages differ in the usage of relative clauses only in a spatial context.
- Subjects
RELATIVE clauses; LINGUISTIC usage; FINNISH language; ESTONIAN language; RUSSIAN language; CLAUSES (Grammar)
- Publication
SKY Journal of Linguistics, 2018, Vol 31, p107
- ISSN
1456-8438
- Publication type
Article