Kommunikaatioverbeistä ruotsinkielisten suomenoppijoiden teksteissä
Verbs of verbal communication in texts written by Swedish-speaking learners of Finnish

Summary/Abstract: In texts written by Swedish-speaking learners of Finnish at the beginners’ level the students use a lot of semantically different kind of verbs. The goal of this investigation is to research verbs that express verbal communication. The verbs of verbal communication can be classified in three groups, the speak verbs, the say verbs and the question verbs. All these verbs can also be called as speech act verbs. The investigation is concentrated to find out which verbs of verbal communication the texts contain and in what sentence types they are to be found. However, the main focus of the investigation lays on the research of the arguments that the verbs can have. The investigation also contains a shorter survey of the forms of the verbs. In the learners texts seven verbs of verbal communication has been found: puhua ‘to speak’, huutaa ‘to shout’, jutella ‘to chat’, sanoa ‘to say’, kertoa ‘to tell’, kysyä ‘to ask’ and vastata ‘to answer’. These verbs occur in total 413 times in the material. The most frequent verbs are the neutral verb sanoa, puhua and kertoa. The verbs sanoa and puhua are very common and frequent in standard Finnish and also in productions written by learners of Finnish with different mother tongues. The verbs of verbal communication appear in different kinds of sentences such as argumentative sentence and in sentences before and after a direct speech. The verbs of verbal communication can occur with sentence arguments and with adverbial arguments inflected in cases. The verbs sanoa, kertoa, kysyä and vastata have interrogative sentences and especially että-subordinate clauses as sentence arguments. With the verb kysyä the learners also use jos-subordinate clauses instead of interrogative sentences. This is a sign of transfer from their mother tongue Swedish. The adverbial arguments in the corpus are inflected in nominative, partitive, illative, elative, allative and ablative. The most frequent cases are elative, allative and ablative. All the arguments inflected in nominative are not correct. The forms of the verbs of verbal communication vary but a typical verb form is a verb in active voice present tense conjugated in third person singular. The mood of the verbs is most often the indicative but there are also some occurrences of conditional forms. The most common tenses of the verbs are the present and the past tense. Of the tenses perfect and pluperfect there are only a few occurrences. The learners also use the verbs in A- and MA-in!nitive forms and the MA-infinitives are in the illative case and the predicates in the sentences are motion verbs. The results of this investigation show that the Swedish-speaking learners at the beginners’ level master the use of verbs of verbal communication well. They also do right case choices needed in the adverbial arguments and even most of the sentence arguments have been handled in a correct way.

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