A Corpus-Based Study on the Degrees of Lexicalization and Grammaticalization of Finnish Converbs

Sammanfattning: This study attempts to define the degrees of lexicalization and grammaticalization of the Finnish converbs ending in ­Ten, ­TUA, ­TessA, ­TAkse­, ­mAllA and -mAttA. The study is based on a corpus of Finnish newspaper texts from the 1990s. The approach is fundamentally functional-typological and cognitive. The productive use of the six Finnish converbs is compared to their lexicalized and grammaticalized instances and to some less prototypical non-finite adverbial verb constructions. In this study lexicalization is seen as a process from transparent and productive, to opaque and unproductive. It also stands for the lexical strength of an item, i.e. how often an item or a co-occurrence of items is repeated in discourse. Grammaticalization, in contrast, is seen as a process from less grammatical to more grammatical. The more grammaticalized an item is, the more it resembles the most prototypical items in the target category. The types of lexicalized converb forms that this study focuses on are adverbs (e.g. yllättäen ‘suddenly, unexpectedly’) and phrasal adverbs (e.g. juurta jaksain ‘thoroughly, root and branch’); the types of grammaticalized converbs analyzed are adpositions (e.g. huolimatta ‘despite, notwithstanding’), conjunctions (e.g. olettaen että ‘supposing’) and sentence adverb markers (e.g. sanoen ‘saying’ in rehellisesti sanoen ‘frankly’). A three-way model is suggested to the degrees of lexicalization on the one hand, and the degrees of grammaticalization on the other. When determining the degrees of lexicalization and grammaticalization of individual items, their syntax, form, semantics and frequency are taken into consideration. The analysis consists of determining the weight of these criteria in each individual instance, exemplifying the productive and lexicalized/grammaticalized uses of the converb forms from the corpus, and providing frequency data on the various uses in the chosen corpus material.