Pian väittelemisen jälkeen puuhastelin hetken aikaa pienen vertailevan tutkimuksen parissa. Kyseisen tutkimuksen päämääränä oli vertailla ranskan intonaatiojärjestelmää ja Sara Routarinteen (2003) tutkimia sävelkulun loppunousuja nuorten Helsingissä asuvien tyttöjen puheessa.

Tutkimukseni osoitti, että vaikka suomen ja ranskan intonaatiojärjestelmät ovat hyvin erilaisia ja vaikka kyseiset kielet eivät ole sukua keskenään, lausumanloppuisten sävelkulun nousujen osalta niissä oli tutkitun aineiston valossa seuraavia yhtäläisyyksiä: 1) sävelkulun loppunousu ilmaisi kummassakin kielessä jatkuvuutta tutkimuksen kohteena olevissa konteksteissa; 2) loppunousu kutsui puhekumppanin reaktiota; 3) loppunousun avulla puhekumppanin huomio kohdistettiin johonkin tiettyyn asiaan; 4) loppunousu oli keino, jonka avulla käännyttiin puhekumppanin puoleen, ja 5) loppunousua käytettiin puhekumppanin orientoimiseen jatkoon nähden.

Samoin kuin ranskassa sävelkulun loppunousuja käytetään yleisesti ‘reeman’ (sanotun varsinaisen sisällön) uudelleen kategorisoimiseen johdannoksi jatkoon nähden, myös tutkitussa suomenkielisessä aineistossa loppunousu uudelleen kategorisoi sanotun eräänlaiseksi johdannoksi jatkoon nähden.

AIHETTA KOSKEVAT JOHTOPÄÄTÖKSET:

• PR = pitch rise (sävelkulun nousu)

Despite the fact that French and Finnish are typologically distant languages and basically characterised by very different intonation systems, some remarkable similarities can be found concerning the use of utterance-final PRs in discourse. Indeed, both the findings of Routarinne (2003) concerning Finnish and those of Morel and Danon-Boileau (1998) concerning French suggest that an utterance-final PR typically 1) indicates continuity, 2) calls the interlocutor’s attention, 3) is used to focus the interlocutor’s attention, 4) constitutes a sign of turning towards the interlocutor, and 5) orients the recipient with regard to what will follow. These similar features were found simply by comparing the results of the studies of Routarinne (2003) and Morel and Danon-Boileau (1998). The original contribution of this paper concerns the phenomenon consisting of the recategorization of the rheme with the help of an utterance-final PR: indeed, applying the theory of Morel and Danon-Boileau (1998) to the data of Routarinne (2003) shows that the Finnish utterances carrying a final PR actually constitute rheme segments that are being recategorised as preambles for what will follow.

The similarity does not, however, concern other positions: the French preambles always carry a final PR (Morel & Danon-Boileau, 1998), whereas – according to this study – the Finnish preambles do not. Thus, whereas the oral paragraphs of French always include several utterance-final PRs, the only utterance-final PRs occurring in the Finnish data are those carried by the recategorised rheme segments. As the final PR occurs in the Finnish data only as a recategorization means and not as a standard element of a certain constituent of the oral paragraph, it remains a marked feature in the Finnish data.

As far as the structure of the oral paragraph is concerned, the findings presented in this paper suggest that the Finnish preamble is much more condensed than the French preamble. According to Morel and Danon-Boileau (1998: 37), the French preamble is typically very long and even a bit heavy. However, as in French, if one or several of the preamble constituents do not occur, the functions typically carried by them are taken over by the other constituents. Indeed, in the Finnish data, one preamble constituent typically carries several functions. In other words, whereas the French preamble constituents typically occur one after another, in the Finnish data, the preamble consists of overlapping segments. For instance, the elements constituting the framework often also carry the functions of several other preamble constituents such as the point of view, the dissociated modus and the disjointed lexical support. Consequently, the Finnish preamble is generally much shorter than the French preamble. Unlike in French, the preambles do not carry a final pitch rise in the Finnish data. On the other hand, instead of using prosodic means for indicating the continuation of the oral paragraph, the preambles of the Finnish data normally include continuation-implicative syntactic features. This highlights the complementarity and the non-redundancy of different levels of marks of cohesion in the structuration of discourse (Morel & Danon-Boileau, 1998).

In light of these data, the general structure of the Finnish rheme seems similar to the French one: ‘pronoun + verb + X’ (‘X’ being a complementary sequence, the nature of which is variable). As in French, it expresses a singularized positioning of the speaker with regard to what has been presented in the preamble (the “point” where the preamble has been driving at). It also brings syntactic completion to the whole constituted by the preambles and by the rheme. Unlike the preambles, the rheme does not normally include any continuation-implicative syntactic features.

Lähdeviite:

• Lehtinen, Mari (2010): The Recategorisation of the Rheme and the Structure of the Oral Paragraph in French and in Finnish. Discours 7 (julkaistu internetissä).