Reviewed by Katrin Hiietam, Manchester, UK

This collection of papers investigates the linguistic manifestation of space and location, the human perspective, and person in Finnish, a language with extremely rich resources for linguistic inquiry. The contributions are written mainly within the frameworks of cognitive grammar and functional typology.

The papers in Part 1, ‘Space and location’, are exclusively within the framework of cognitive grammar. In ‘Spatial axes in language and conceptualisation: The case of bidirectional constructions’, Krista Ojutkangas describes spatial relations in which opposing roles of a spatial axis are explicitly mentioned in a single sentence, such as The bride and the groom were sitting behind the table and the guests were sitting in front of the table. She demonstrates that bidirectional constructions elaborate the spatial description and function as a tool for tracking figure and ground referents through discourse.

Tuomas Huumo investigates how fictive motion (i.e. directional cases that indicate movement towards, or away from, something) is expressed using the Finnish case system in ‘“I woke up from the sofa”: Subjective directionality in Finnish expressions of a spatio-cognitive transfer’. He concludes that the use of directional cases reflects fictive motion between different cognitive domains and a direct interaction between a cognitive domain and space.

In ‘Metonymy in locatives of state’, Tiina Onikki-Rantajääskö examines abstract uses of locative case expressions, in particular, locatives of state, which include expressions of posture and facial expressions. She illustrates that the polysemy of locative expressions is based on cultural models.

Part 2 investigates ‘The human perspective’ of linguistic expression. In ‘Body part names and grammaticalization’, Toni Suutari argues that, in addition to standard cases of grammaticalization, there may be instances in which an abstract relational expression acquires a concrete meaning, which, in turn, grammaticalizes.

In ‘On distinguishing between “recipient” and “beneficiary” in Finnish’, Seppo Kittilä demonstrates how these two semantic roles are manifested by case marking. According to Kittilä, recipients are marked by the allative case only if an event involves someone who directly receives something as a result of the activity (i.e. typically, give). If this condition is not met, the argument is marked as a beneficiary.

‘Oblique mentions of human referents in Finnish conversation: The effects of prominence in discourse and grammar’, by Ritva Laury, explores human referents that do not occur with core argument case marking. Typologically, human referents are prominent and thus frequently occur in the roles of subject and object. She concludes that even in oblique cases, human referents are central in grammar and discourse and mainly occur in constructions with grammatical, rather than local, meaning.

The three papers contained in Part 3 examine the morphological encoding of ‘Person’. Marja-Liisa Helasvou and Lea Laitinen, ‘Person in Finnish: Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations in interaction’, present a thorough study of person marking. They show that the predicate verb agrees with the subject in number and person, and therefore, traditionally, both the nominal subject and the verbal person marking are considered to be the same. However, the authors show that in colloquial varieties, the situation is more complex. Their paradigm of person marking includes two constructions—the zero person construction and the passive—that create open reference that must be construed from the context. Lea Laitinen continues this theme in ‘Zero person in Finnish: A grammatical resource for construing human reference’. Finally, in ‘Passive—personal or impersonal? A Finnish perspective’, Marja-Liisa Helasvuo asks whether the Finnish passive is a personal or impersonal construction. She concludes that the Finnish passive is a part of the person marking system and thus is by no means an impersonal construction.