Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 106, December 2016, Pages 80-96
Journal of Pragmatics

Disclaiming epistemic access with ‘know’ and ‘remember’ in Finnish

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2016.07.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Tietää ‘to know’ and muistaa ‘to remember’ tend to occur in the first person negative.

  • Word order and complementation patterns are sensitive to sequential position.

  • Negative-initial format tends to occur in responsive position without complements.

  • Pronoun-initial format less common in responsive position, but has more complements.

  • Formats manifest different degrees of phonetic reduction.

Abstract

This article describes the denial of epistemic access through the use of the verbs tietää ‘to know’ and muistaa ‘to remember’ in Finnish conversation. The authors show that both verbs tend to occur in the first person negative form. Each verb is likely to occur in certain formulaic syntactic formats that are in turn associated with particular sequential and interactional contexts, in which they perform certain functions beyond simple denial of knowing and remembering, such as hedging and rejecting a compliment. We show that the negative-initial format for both verbs is likely to occur in responsive position and to occur without any complements, while the pronoun-initial format is less likely to occur in responsive position and more likely to be followed by complements. Both these tendencies are stronger for the verb tietää ‘to know’ than the verb muistaa ‘to remember’. The verb tietää functions as an epistemic marker and as a projective fragment in our data. The clearest tendency for the verb muistaa emerging from our data is that it often occurs in contexts of reminiscing, involving several instances of use of the verb by different participants in close succession. The formats also manifest different degrees of phonetic reduction, at least partly due to differences in frequency of use. We suggest that the use of these verbs in Finnish conversation manifests the emergent and sequentially sensitive nature of grammar, as its design is motivated by its use in human interaction.

Introduction

This paper concerns the use of the Finnish verbs tietää ‘to know’ and muistaa ‘to remember’ in everyday Finnish conversation. The article shows that the use of these verbs is formulaic and often phonetically reduced, and that the use of particular formats is closely connected to the sequential contexts in which the verbs occur, and to the activities underway in the conversation. Besides disclaiming epistemic access, each expression emerges in the accomplishment of particular tasks in interaction; for example, the negative-initial format for the verb tietää ‘to know’, en mä tiedä, is most likely to occur as a response to something said just prior, such as in answers to questions, while the use of muistaa ‘to remember’ is connected with the activity of collective reminiscing. Therefore, they can be considered “social action formats” (e.g. Kärkkäinen, 2012), “emergent discourse patterns” (Scheibman, 2002) or “prefabs” (Erman and Warren, 2000, Bybee, 2010).

Many prior studies have shown that cognition verbs crystallize into fixed units in a range of languages (e.g. Östman, 1981, Thompson and Mulac, 1991, Tao, 2003, Kärkkäinen, 2003 on English; Keevallik, 2003, Keevallik, 2008, Keevallik, 2011 on Estonian; Günthner and Imo, 2004, Imo, 2011 on German; Karlsson, 2006 on Swedish; Laury and Okamoto, 2011 on English and Japanese; Endo, 2010, Endo, 2013, Tao, 2013 on Mandarin; Maschler, 2012 on Hebrew; Helasvuo, 2014 on Finnish; Posio, 2014 on Peninsular Spanish and Portuguese). The study of expressions of lack of epistemic access have further shown that such claims of access are used by participants to accomplish a number of interactional tasks beyond simple denial of knowing or remembering something, as we also show for tietää and muistaa (e.g., Goodwin, 1987, Kärkkäinen, 2003, Tao, 2013, Weatherall, 2011, Keevallik, 2011; Pekarek Doehler, in press).

In the literature on cognitive verbs and crystallization, there are several studies concerning the crystallization of patterns containing verbs of knowing (e.g. Östman, 1981, Weatherall, 2011 on the English know; Keevallik, 2003, Keevallik, 2006, Keevallik, 2011 on the Estonian teada; Karlsson, 2006 on the Swedish veta; Maschler, 2012 on the Hebrew yada; Posio, 2015 on the Spanish ). However, there is far less literature on verbs of remembering and their patterning in discourse (see, however, Tao, 2003 on the English remember and Tao, 2013 and this issue on the Mandarin jìdé and similar expressions, Helasvuo, 2014 on the Finnish muistaa).

While linguists have been interested in issues of knowledge and its reflection in language structure for a long time (e.g. Chafe, 1976), the topic of epistemics has been of interest to conversation analysts as well; for a useful summary of this research, see Heritage (2013). As Goodwin showed in his early work (1979), participants in conversation are attentive to the distribution of knowledge among their addressees, and tailor their utterances accordingly. A useful distinction developed by Heritage is the one between epistemic status, i.e. participants’ relative access to a particular domain of knowledge, including their rights and responsibilities to know something, and, on the other hand, epistemic stance, which concerns the expression of epistemic status in turns at talk through different linguistic formats. In this paper, we are concerned primarily with epistemic stances expressed in conversation, but also epistemic status.

Some basic background on Finnish grammar will be helpful to those readers who are unfamiliar with the language. The basic word order in Finnish is SVX; subjects are usually clause-initial and objects and other complements come after the verb (e.g. Helasvuo, 2001), although word order is also free in the sense that other word orders also occur and are not ungrammatical (Vilkuna, 1989). Relevantly for this paper, clausal negation involves the use of a negation auxiliary which takes person markers but not tense or mood. In connection with the negation auxiliary, the main verb takes a special connegative form. The negation auxiliary has features of both a verb and a particle; it has been observed that Uralic languages manifest a drift involving the gradual change from verbal to particle negation (e.g. Miestamo, 2011: 90). Under certain semantic and pragmatic conditions, especially in spoken Finnish, the negation auxiliary can occur clause-initially. This occurs when the speaker is denying some claim or implication in prior talk rather than denying something upcoming in her own current turn (Hakulinen, 2012).

This article is structured as follows. We first discuss our data and methodology in Section 2. Section 3 is the core of the paper in which we first present some initial, general and quantitative findings on Finnish verbs of cognition (Section 3.1) and then analyze the use of tietää (Section 3.2) and the use of muistaa (Section 3.3) in our corpus of Finnish conversations. Section 4 summarizes our findings.

Section snippets

Materials and method

The study is based on more than seven hours of everyday conversation from corpora housed at the Universities of Helsinki and Turku. The data contained in all 278 occurrences of tietää ‘to know’ and 111 occurrences of muistaa ‘to remember’. These data are referred to as the “larger dataset” below. The data show that the majority of occurrences of both tietää ‘to know’ and muistaa ‘to remember’ are in the negative, and that both verbs also show a preference for first person singular (see

Frequency and general patterns

The two verbs in focus in this study are among the most frequently occurring cognitive verbs in Finnish conversation. Table 1 illustrates the distribution of cognitive verbs across person forms in our data (the table is modified from Helasvuo, 2014, who uses the same data). The table shows that Finnish cognitive verbs show significant skewing with respect to person, number and polarity.

In our data, tietää ‘to know’ is the most frequent cognitive verb (N = 278), and muistaa ‘to remember’ the third

Conclusion

We have discussed uses of two Finnish cognitive verbs, tietää ‘to know’ and muistaa ‘to remember’ in ordinary everyday conversations. Our data show that both of these verbs are likely to occur in the first person singular negated form, with tietää showing a strong preference for negative polarity and muistaa showing a strong preference for first person use. Both verbs occur overwhelmingly in the present tense (94–95% are in the present tense). Thus Finnish speakers tend to talk mostly about

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the organizers, participants and audience at the panel on Disclaiming Knowledge at the 2014 ICCA conference at UCLA for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, as well as the editors of this special issue and the two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. Ritva Laury is also grateful for the opportunity to present the early beginnings of this research at a meeting of the doctoral school Talk, Action and Interaction in January 2011, and for

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