Browsing by Author "Laine, Emma"

This thesis studies the use of four discourse particles (jees, jes, jess, yes) and their positions in a sequence. Data of this thesis comes from Suomi24 corpus. The goal is to find out how English-origin particle yes has adapted in borrowing process to its own specific particles and do these have distinct or similar functions in Finnish. There is also the question of the significance of sequence position in consideration, for example, does the end position correlate with closing the sequence function? The theories used are conversation analysis, discourse analysis and marginally sociolinguistics. There is a consideration of English in Finland and elsewhere on the background, including pragmatic borrowing. Methodology is based on corpus-methods. 200 particles per variant (jees, jes, jess and yes) have been collected from Suomi24 corpus and imported into an Excel sheet. The frequencies and percentages will be counted. This is conducted according to sequence position (start, middle, end) and function (adjective, affirmative, e.g.). Jees is the most established particle out of all the particles, and it has the function of adjective the most. Thus, it has gone through a pragmatic borrowing process. Yes-particle is most used as an interjection. The results of these two particles correlated with earlier research the most. Jes and jess show dispersion in their functions and positions. Change-of-state-token and closing the sequence have only marginal functions. Sequence positions are not in complementary distribution while they have certain tendencies. The study illustrates that these particles, specifically jes, jess and yes need more research, for there are a lot of dispersion in both functions and positions. In fact, one limit in the study is that the spoken language influence has not been considered. These particles could be studied more in corpus and spoken language studies to gain a broader understanding of them. This study does give guidelines in regards with what kind of properties these English-based Finnish particles do have.