This article investigates the Finnish Existential Partitive Construction in web corpora from a quantitative point of view, analyzing the occurrence frequencies of existential verbs in the construction. The aim is to examine how often different verbs feature in the Finnish Existential Partitive Construction in corpora. Verb frequencies in this type of Finnish construction have not been studied before. The study proposes two different applications of collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003): one based on a reduced sample, and another based on an Expected Sample size. It is then shown that the former sampling leads to biased results, while the latter considers the absolute frequency of the verbs on a whole-corpus level. Specifically, the verb löytyä ‘to be found’ is more prone to be associated with the Finnish Existential Construction, and this corroborates the idea of a copular interpretation of that verb.

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The Finnish Existential Partitive Construction: Comparing Two Applications of Collostructional Analysis

  • Rodolfo Basile

摘要

This article investigates the Finnish Existential Partitive Construction in web corpora from a quantitative point of view, analyzing the occurrence frequencies of existential verbs in the construction. The aim is to examine how often different verbs feature in the Finnish Existential Partitive Construction in corpora. Verb frequencies in this type of Finnish construction have not been studied before. The study proposes two different applications of collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003): one based on a reduced sample, and another based on an Expected Sample size. It is then shown that the former sampling leads to biased results, while the latter considers the absolute frequency of the verbs on a whole-corpus level. Specifically, the verb löytyä ‘to be found’ is more prone to be associated with the Finnish Existential Construction, and this corroborates the idea of a copular interpretation of that verb.