Thesis (doctoral)--Helsingin yliopisto, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 202-211).

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Helsinki, 2008. / Includes bibliographies of Finnish, German, and bilingual dictionaries of ecology and environmental protection. Includes bibliographical references (p. [345]-396).

<p>The purpose of this study was to investigate the view of Finnish dialects and identity of first, second and third generation of Sweden Finns students in 7th, 8th and 9th graders, in two Sweden Finn schools. The questions at issue for the essay were: How do Swedes of Finnish extraction think of the Finnish dialects? Is there a correlation between identifying as Finnish and knowledge and usage of the Finnish dialects, as opposed to Finns living in Finland? To which extent do the Finnish students have knowledge regarding the Finnish dialects? To answer the questions a quantitative method was used and a questionnaire was answered by over 100 students. The results of the study showed that the Finnish dialects did not exert any influence on the students’ life nor their sense of identity. Their knowledge regarding dialects was limited to standard Finnish and the dialect of Helsinki Finnish.</p>

<p>ABSTRACT</p><p>The aim with this essay is to specify and to describe such linguistic elements, which hamper readability of the Finnish news language at SVT: s Uutiset. The aim is also to give examples on how, with the aid of language cultivation, readability of the Finnish news language can be improved. Yet another aim is to write an essay that is useful in news reporters’ daily work and that the essay justifies and enthuses them to an active language cultivation.</p><p>The study is based on 224 news cases, done by SVT: s Finnish editorial staff between January 3 and July 1, 2005. The study method is qualitative and descriptive, and the study includes morphology, syntax and semantics.</p><p>The result of the study shows that the linguistic elements that hamper readability of news language are long sentences and long attribute chains, noun style, postpositional constructions, word order and cases, and statistical expressions. These linguistic elements influence how clearly, easily and concise news language is considered. Problematic seems also to be how sentences, constituents and words are to be emphasized and how they should be tied together in a cohesive and correct way. The linguistic elements that often occur in the material are common also in other text genres and are well-known within language cultivation literature.</p>

<p>The study deals with the usage of tenses in Finnish and Swedish. The analysis focuses on the tenses of finite verb-forms and the aim is to compare differences in tense usage in order to notice where if at all the tense usage differs. The material used comprises one Finnish novel, one Swedish novel and their translations.</p><p>The Finnish novel chosen is written by Arto Paasilinna and is called Aatami ja Eeva. The Swedish novel is called Ingen mans land and it is written by Jan Guillou. These novels were chosen because they are both contemporary and the texts were comparable with regard to how much narrative and dialogue they contain.</p><p>One problem with generalizing is, that authors as well as translators all have their own idiolect; a variety of a language unique to an individual. A translator may also use a different tense as a stylistic device, for example to enliven the text or to add some drama into it.</p><p>My hypothesis was, that due to the semantic similarities between the two languages the tense usage is very similar in Finnish and Swedish. Clear differences were not expected.</p><p>The findings of the study verified my hypothesis. However, the study showed that Finnish past perfect was often translated as imperfect tense in the Swedish text and vice versa. The tenses concerned are a "temporal couple", both of them indicating "the past of the past". It might be due to this that it has been possible to change the tense in the translation without affecting the meaning of the sentence. My conclusion is, that in addition to this altering the tense was in many cases a stylistic choice.</p><p>Keywords: tenses, tense usage, Finnish, Swedish, translation</p>

No description available.

The object of this study is to shed new light on both the influence exerted on Finnish by the Swedish language, and on the mechanisms by which language contact in structural domains takes place. It is argued that syntactic borrowing should be regarded as a subtype of reanalysis and extension rather than as an independent mechanism. Also, the need to regard linguistic structural change as teleologically motivated rather than deterministically caused is stressed. Possibilities to apply a framework based on A.N. Whitehead’s process philosophy to language change are explored. The corpus consists of six legal translations from the 1580s to 1759. The areas studied, all relating to Finnish object and subject marking, are those of the Finnish passive, which under foreign influence has shown tendencies to change from a typically non-promotional passive to a promotional passive; Finnish necessitive constructions, which form an active-stative subsystem within Finnish with marked active subjects and unmarked objects/non-active subjects but have shown tendencies to develop a nominative-accusative system in dialects influenced by Swedish; and the Finnish relative word "kuin", which has been taken to be a Swedish calque modelled on "som". The result is a complex interplay of reanalyses and extensions with foreign model patterns involved to a varying degree. Development of a promotional passive seems to involve both internal semantic factors and Swedish models. Necessitive subjects appear to be marked or unmarked on the basis of a merger between constructions involving active subjects and passive objects, possibly modelled on Swedish. And the relative word "kuin" has been integrated into Old Finnish in a way at odds with the usage of the model pattern. This vindicates abandoning the dichotomy between “internal” and “external” changes, and regarding language contact as a background factor rather than as an independent cause.

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Helsinki, 1984. / Added thesis t.p. inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 138-144).

This study presents a pragmatic viewpoint toward the analysis of definiteness, regarding the universal, primitive notions of topic, theme, focus, emphasis, specificity, reference, and restrictivity as the controlling features of discourse which are coded in derivative syntactic structures such as the Finnish case selection and word order and the English determiner system in irregular ways. The explanation of the English article as a mere marker of definiteness which is to be translated into Finnish as case, word order, and stress variations does not reveal how each language deals with nounrelated discourse functions. But if the pragmatic motivation controlling the expression of definiteness is first analyzed as an organizing principle in the syntax of an utterance, then the language-specific, superficial manifestations can be identified in a more exhaustive manner.The basic hypothesis in the study was that definiteness is a grammatical concept which is derived from the universal pragmatic functions but may not always be established in each language separately as a syntactic category. It was shown how the pragmatic notions of topicality, thematicity, focality, emphasis, specificity, reference, restrictivity,.and presuppositionality interact with the derived features of case, word order, stress, and function words in Finnish. It was observed that due to their biassed typological nature, languages combine the primitives in different ways so that a language which lacks a morphological or lexical system of marking definiteness (Finnish) must allow for more extensive pragmatic control of word order than a language which has an overt article system (English) in order to reflect the pragmatic conditions of an utterance.It was suggested in the study that the primary function of case markings (specifically, the nominative/accusative vs. partitive contrast) in Finnish is not the expression of definiteness through the totality/ partiality contrast and that the order of sentence elements is not always a direct indicator of definiteness or indefiniteness. Instead, the Finnish case selection is a result of pragmatic functions such as topicality, focality, completeness of action, specificity, referentiality, and emphasis, whereas word order in its marked/unmarked forms is related to givenness/newness and thus, topicality/focality. Seven Subject Rules and four Object Rules were formulated to account for the typological limits within which the pragmatic control of sentence elements in Finnish must operate.The study concluded that definiteness is a pragmatic consequence of a number of different things which are not coded in Finnish as they are in English. Whereas English has syntacticized definiteness and Finnish has not, the discourse functions which correspond to Finnish case and word order and the English article system are interpreted pragmatically in ways that are not equivalent between the two languages. Because definiteness is subject to syntactic limitations which themselves are contingent on pragmatic factors,: it is appropriate to speak of definiteness as a derivative function which can be attributed only to languages with an overt article system.

No description available.