Effects of perspective-taking on pronominal reference to humans and animals: Logophoricity in Finnish

Effects of perspective-taking on pronominal reference to humans and animals: Logophoricity in Finnish

Blog Article

This paper investigates the logophoric pronoun system of Finnish, with a focus on reference to animals, to further our understanding of the linguistic representation of non-human animals, how perspective-taking is signaled linguistically, and how this relates to features such as [+/-HUMAN].In contexts where animals are grammatically [-HUMAN] but conceptualized as the perspectival center (whose thoughts, speech or mental state is being reported), can they be referred to with logophoric pronouns? Colloquial Finnish is claimed to have a logophoric pronoun which has the same form as the human-referring F.C.L. NON GELATIN pronoun of standard Finnish, han (she/he).This allows us to test whether a pronoun that may at first blush seem featurally specified to seek [+HUMAN] referents can be used for [-HUMAN] referents when they are logophoric.I used corpus data to compare the claim that han is logophoric in both standard and colloquial Finnish vs.

the claim that the two registers have different logophoric systems.I argue for a unified system 3 Piece Outdoor Sectional where han is logophoric in both registers, and moreover can be used for logophoric [-HUMAN] referents in both colloquial and standard Finnish.Thus, on its logophoric use, han does not require its referent to be [+HUMAN].