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Clause connectives in Finnish children’s literature 167
and meaningful in relation to the other alternatives that were not chosen, a
brief look at the other options than using an explicit clause connective in a
Finnish text is perhaps in order. 1 If, then, there is no explicit clause connective,
there may be no other type of signal indicating the clausal relation either,
but the relation must be inferred from the context. However, unlike e.g. the
optional reporting that in English, a Finnish subordinative conjunction or
relative pronoun cannot simply be deleted without making radical changes
to the clause structure (see examples (1) and (2) below). Therefore, choosing
this zero alternative in Finnish is likely to be a conscious strategy, whereas the
English zero/that variation may be an unconscious one (see Olohan & Baker
2000:143).
Instead of an explicit cohesion marker, a weaker signal, e.g. ja ‘and’, can
be used. Ja is rather uninformative as it does not indicate the type of relation
between clauses, unless the relation is simply additive. Ja can be employed as
a kind of weak glue, to avoid creating a fragmentary, staccato rhythm by separating
clauses with full stops. Finally, there are various other more or less implicit
and rather complex realisations, referred to as nonfinite constructions
(NCs). In the present context, the most interesting NCs are contracted clauses
indicating temporal, referential and purpose relations, and premodified participial
attributes equivalent to relative clauses. These constructions are very
typical of Finnish texts and frequently used, although they sometimes tend to
makethetext“heavy”,difficulttoreadandunderstand.Theycanberegarded
as grammatical metaphors, which are marked, incongruent forms of encoding
(Halliday 1994; Ravelli 1988). It is assumed that in English the typical, unmarked
way of referring to an action, for example, is a verb, and using a noun
instead is thus regarded as a marked, metaphorical expression. Similarly, qualities,
which are usually realised by adjectives, can be expressed with nouns, and
clausal relations, typically realised by connectives, can be expressed by nonfinite
verb forms. What is considered a grammatical metaphor or a congruent
realisation is a language-specific issue, but these basic ideas about English seem
to be applicable to Finnish as well. (For the application of the concept of grammatical
metaphor to Finnish texts, see Karvonen 1991 and Puurtinen 1993,
1995:96–103.)
Example (1) shows two alternative ways of expressing a causal and a
referential relation. The first, authentic version (Daniels 1998, trans. Jaana
Kapari), includes two contracted clauses (in bold), whereas the second version
(my formulation) signals the clausal relations with conjunctions.