The ‘Finnish Affair’. Semantic vs. syntactic aspects in Jespersen’s, Hjelmslev’s and Anderson’s descriptions of the case-system of Finnish

ABSTRACT In the 1930s the two Danish linguists Otto Jespersen (1860–1943) and Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) both referred to the Finnish case-system in their discussions of the importance of the concept of case. In my paper, I examine first the problems that arise when cases are excluded from the (syntactical) analysis as in Jespersen’s symbolic system, and thereafter the problems that arise when one tries to establish a localist based system of cases and their semantic values, as in Hjelmslev’s work. Further, I examine the problems that John M. Anderson is confronted with when he analyses the Finnish cases with his localist theory of universal cases. It is concluded (1) that Jespersen’s syntactically based symbolic system cannot capture much of the grammatically encoded information in Finnish; (2) that Hjelmslev’s localist model, which takes Finnish as a benchmark in order to explain the structure of complex case-systems, includes the semantic issue of the relationship between the localistically defined categories and the grammatical ones; (3) that Anderson uses Finnish to showcase his theory, but that his rendering of Finnish also represents a challenge for this.