Usage of demonstratives se, tämä and tuo in spoken Finnish narratives

This paper focuses on the use of Finnish demonstrative pronouns tämä ("this"), tuo ("that") and se ("it") in spoken narratives. Special attention is paid to their adnominal use in comparison to the use of the bare nominal phrase in anaphoric reference. The source of inspiration for this paper are thoughts on the on-going grammaticalization of Finnish demonstrative se into the definite article in spoken Finnish, which was previously studied by Laury (1997) and Juvonen (2000). The grammaticalization is said to be reflected in a strikingly high frequency of its use and in the fact that the form is allegedly spreading into new functional contexts. The goal of this paper is to describe the distribution of Finnish demonstratives in spoken narratives and to identify factors which possibly influence the choice of means of reference. In order to do this the recordings were transcribed according to the orthographic rules of Finnish, segmented into clauses within which all nominal and pronominal phrases were identified. These phrases were afterwards coded for a set of parameters based on the work of Zíková (2017) concerning the potential grammaticalization of Czech lexeme ten (it). Material used in this paper consists of retelling stories of three short videos by five native speakers of Finnish. The final..