Nollasubjektilauseiden luontevuus suomenoppijoiden näkökulmasta
The plausibility of zero-subject constructions from the point of view of L2 learners of Finnish

Summary/Abstract: Employing a questionnaire, we investigate how well the advanced learners of Finnish recognize different zero-person constructions and what kind of zero-person constructions the L2 speakers of Finnish find the most plausible. While doing so, we also experiment with different exercise types and explore how they could benefit the L2 research. The zero person often receives less attention than the passive voice in the L2 textbooks of Finnish, which may be due to the difficulty of approaching it because of the lack of specific structural features. In the L2 teaching of Finnish, this has led to the emphasizing of certain types of zero-person constructions, such as those containing a modal verb. However, since the zero person (and the zero subject) is a very frequent phenomenon in both everyday speech and in more formal language use, recognizing it and its contexts of use is essential also for the learner language. Our questionnaire makes use of a corpus study of spoken language data. Our results suggest that the interpretation of zero-person constructions is often difficult for the L2 learners of Finnish and that the interpretation is primarily affected by verb semantics and not by the other constituents nor their order in the clause.

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