Journal of Uralic Linguistics - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025

While there is a great deal of work analyzing definiteness in Finnish, the literature on the ongoing development of a definite article is either inconclusive or incomplete. Using a battery of tests gauging definiteness and articlehood, this article argues that Finnish has developed a definite article. The core proposal is that the demonstrative elements se/ne ‘that/those’ have developed into definite articles, syntactically D heads, while still also occurring as neutral demonstratives. This paper therefore proposes that, for Finnish se and ne, each one has two lexical entries: one for the definite article, and one for the demonstrative.

Deictic items encoding coordinative dimensions of space and time often grammaticalize into markers of epistemic categories. This study examines what kind of epistemic system is formed by the tense-deictic retrospectivizing particles əʎe/əʎə and ulmaʃ/ələn in the Mari languages. Based on a corpus study, the paper proposes a new perspective-based approach to the evidentiality of the particle constructions and shows how they also participate in a discourse-interactive custom of Common Ground management. Both functions stem from the internal semantics of the particle constructions which in essence are multiple perspective constructions expressing two observer positions with respect to one state of affairs. Crucially, also spatial deictics express epistemic differences based on observer positions, but they have different communicational properties. Spatial environment allows intersubjective reference to speaker and addressee perspectives, while the Mari temporal particle constructions are fully speaker-anchored. Thus, the epistemic grammaticalization potential of the two types of deictics is shown to be different.

Estonian declarative main clauses display a relatively strict verb-second (V2) order, resembling Germanic V2. However, two prosody-conditioned exceptions distinguish Estonian from Germanic: verb-third occurs with weak proforms in the ‘EPP-position’ and with nuclear-stressed finite verbs. We claim that the derivation of Estonian V2 differs from Germanic. The Estonian left periphery resembles Finnish, a closely related but non-V2 language. In both languages, finite verbs move to the highest T-domain head and a phrasal category moves to the specifier of this head, the EPP-position. Estonian V2 with its exceptions results from “Weak Start,” a prosodic constraint blocking spell-out of the highest copy of the chain derived by movement to the EPP-position when another phrasal constituent occupies the C-domain.

Binding conditions are usually modelled as a mapping from syntactic structures into sets of coreference relations expressed and represented by narrow syntactic devices such as indices and/or formal operations such as Agree. Here we consider an alternative based on binding data from Finnish and English in which the mappings are generated dynamically during left-to-right comprehension of an arbitrary number of sentences (“conversations”) at the language-cognition interface. The model assumes that binding regulates semantic assignment management at the language-cognition interface by blanking out portions of the transient discourse available for coreference computations at the hearer’s end. The hypothesis is tested by using the computational generative grammar methodology.