Équivalents finnois des prédications averbales premières et secondes

Abstract

In Finnish, French detached and integrated secondary predications correspond to so-called “predicative complements”, which are marked by a special case, such as the essive (Hakulinen & alii, 2004). Since only nominal appositions are detached in Finnish (John, my elder brother, has just got married), the difference between French detached and integrated constructions is marked by other syntactic means. Verbless autonomous predications also appear in Finnish and they normally take the nominative or partitive case. However, since other cases may also appear, we try to find out if in the Finnish translations of French novels the choice of the grammatical case underlines the differences between verbless predications and additions or elliptic adjuncts and between autonomous and secondary predications : do cases used in autonomous predications show more autonomy in relation to the preceding sentence than those appearing in secondary predications ? The corpus consists of the Finnish translation of adjectival and nominal autonomous and secondary predications taken from three contemporary French novels.

Keywords

• autonomous verbless predications
• Finnish case marking
• secondary predications
• translation from French into Finnish