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T
UOMAS
H
UUMO
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IIA
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EIPONEN
86
the English
in front of
(static) vs.
ahead
(dynamic). In Finnish, the opposition
between static and dynamic FoRs (in the spatial domain) is, to an extent,
marked by the opposition between
internal
and
external
local case forms of
certain adpositions. For instance, the static meaning ’in front of’ is expressed
by the inessive form of the ’front’ gram,
edessä
, whereas the dynamic sense
’ahead’ is expressed by its adessive form
edellä
(Huumo 2013).
This paper studies similar oppositions in the functions of the lateral axis
adposition
viere
- ’next to’, which is also inflected in all six local cases. We
pay attention to the opposition between its inessive form
vieressä
and adessive
form
vierellä
. Native speaker intuition suggests that the opposition is, at least
to some extent, similar to that between
edessä
and
edellä
: the inessive
vieres-
sä
is compatible with static situations, whereas the adessive
vierellä
is able to
designate a dynamic situation with a moving Ground. Our small corpus study
of written newspaper text shows that
vieressä
is indeed the semantically un-
marked ’next to’ adposition in Finnish, and more frequent of the two, whereas
the uses of
vierellä
concentrate around more specific meaning types: 1)
expressions of motion, as in ’She was running next to me’; 2) expressions of
support or solidarity between people, as in ’The family spent the whole night
next to the dying grandfather’; 3) expressions of situations where people are
posing next to an artifact often created or owned by them, such as a work of
art, a car, or the like, as in ’The young Internet millionaire posing next to his
new Lamborghini’. Meaning 3 is typical in captions related to pictures. What
is common to these meanings is the sense of dynamicity, which may
manifest itself as actual motion but also as a more abstract relationship
between the participants. For instance, people who support each other can be
seen as striving together towards an abstract goal (e.g., that of comforting a
sick or dying person), and people posing next to artifacts often wish to
communicate something about their relationship with that artifact (such as
their artistic achievements or success in society) to other people. It can thus
be argued that
vierellä
shows at least a tendency to occur in clauses de-
signating a dynamic relationship between the Figure and the Ground,
whereas
vieressä
is the semantically unmarked form to indicate the meaning
’next to’.
T
UOMAS
H
UUMO
– P
IIA
P
EIPONEN