Reviewed by Anastassia Zabrodskaja, Tallinn University

Finnish and Estonian are Uralic Finno-Ugric languages, with a rich pronominal system. In Finnish, it is possible to speak about three demonstratives (tämä ‘this’, tuo ‘this’, se ‘it, s/he’) and in Estonian two (see ‘this’, too ‘that’). Depending on different sociopragmatic factors in both languages, demonstratives can be used as personal pronouns. This book looks into pronominal reference in Finnish and Estonian and presents a comprehensive study on the use of pronouns in these two closely related languages. The papers represent different linguistic subfields, from ethnomethodology to the theory of grammaticalization.

The book comprises eight papers. Marja Etelämäki describes the referential and indexical features of the Finnish demonstrative pronouns. Believing that referents in conversation are interactional entities, she shows how the Finnish demonstratives relate the referent to the ongoing context, simultaneously organizing the context. The Finnish demonstrative pronouns can be used without a nominal head in referring to human referents. Eeva-Leena Seppänen concentrates on the Finnish demonstrative tämä. She argues that demonstrative pronouns indicate the referent’s role in the speech situation’s participation framework. Ritva Laury examines the three Finnish demonstratives, whose use is not limited to the expression of type-identifiable referents. She shows the connectivity between such pronouns, the nontopical nature of the referents, and the evidentiality. Lea Laitinen’s paper presents a comparative study of the third person pronoun hän ‘s/he’. Comparing standard Finnish with nonstandard varieties of spoken Finnish, she reveals that in the former it is used only as a personal pronoun for human referents.

Renate Pajusalu’s paper is the only one dedicated to the Estonian pronouns. Using data from a spoken language corpus collected at Tartu University, she claims that the Estonian pronominal system, where concurrency between different case forms historically evolved, is striving toward the distinction of different cases. Although in the genitive the short pronoun form ta ‘it’ suits grammatically to both animate and inanimate entities, the longer pronoun forms tema ‘s/he’ and selle ‘its’ are used. On the basis of the experimental results and patterns in the corpus data Elsi Kaiser claims that hän and tämä differ in their referential properties and are sensitive to different kinds of factors. The first refers to subjects, regardless of word order, and the latter to postverbal constituents, especially objects. Outi Duvallon applies a syntactic approach to the use and interpretations of the Finnish pronoun se in spoken texts. She finds that the pronoun serves referents already introduced in the interlocutors’ center of attention, as well as captures referents whose existence is only expectable on the basis of the linguistic context. Analyzing the corpus of spoken Finnish, Päivi Juvonen focuses on both indefinite pronouns and other parts-of-speech elements. She discusses the use of the determiners in a crosslinguistic grammaticalization perspective. This book is an excellent introduction into the most innovative research on pronominal reference in Finnish and Estonian.