The expression of change-of-state in the Finnic languages

Abstract

The present article studies verbs that are used to convey change-of-state in the Finnic languages: “to come”, “to go”, “to remain/stay”, “to get”, “will be”, “to make/do”, and “to be born/give birth”. These are polysemous core verbs, which can be expected to be integrated in constructions with (new) generalized grammatical meaning. As will be shown, in order to convey change-of-state typically they occur in constructions that either mark the goal and the source or leave both unmarked. In addition, change can be associated with experiential, existential, and possessive constructions, which also enable to shed more light on the development of the above-mentioned verbs, including the possible development change-of-state → future. The article demonstrates that each Finnic language uses several verbs from the list presented above, but there are differences in what are the most commonly used ones and in what kind of constructions they occur. In some languages, there is a general change-of-state verb, which also appears as a future copula if there is no competing future copula. In the case of Estonian, Finnish, and Livonian, the results of previous studies on change-of-state predicates were used; for the other Finnic languages, a separate data set was compiled using various collections of texts.

Keywords

• become-constructions
• future copulas
• clause types
• language contacts