Readymade grammar. Why are Finnish postpositions an open class?

Abstract

<p>Postpositions relate to the local case system both semantically and<br>structurally: they share the basic semantic categories they express, and the<br>majority of Finnish postpositions are lexicalised forms of nouns inflected in<br>local cases. This paper focuses on Finnish postpositions as open class. Finnish<br>postpositions form sets, that is, groups of words that have different lexical<br>origins but with near-synonymous meanings and similar morphological<br>structures. The sheer number of Finnish postpositions makes it implausible<br>that each of them would have undergone an individual grammaticalisation<br>process. The objective of this study is to evaluate the emergence of new<br>postpositions from a wider perspective, relying on construction-based<br>argumentation. A crucial factor in the openness of postpositions is the<br>ambiguity of the genitive construction, which makes it possible to reanalyse<br>a local-case inflected noun as a postposition, and to begin using it in a<br>postposition construction. This is how some postposition types acquire<br>new members directly as readymade postpositions. These are lexemes in a<br>local case form which become postpositions by entrenchment, by repeated<br>use of language speakers. This analysis introduces several mechanisms of<br>entrenchment that produce and maintain openness. The basic mechanism is<br>analogy, and the analysis also points to different motivations that explain the<br>postposition sets: language users seek out expressions for different semantic<br>nuances, and they look for novel or even playful expressions. However, other<br>motivating factors are language ideologies and the impact of other languages.<br></p>