Subject pronouns in Ingrian Finnish

The article addresses the issue of use/omission of subject pronouns in Ingrian Finnish. The data comes from prose fiction by V. Valjakka and P. Mutanen, previously not used for any linguistic analysis, and from oral narratives recorded under the supervision of Irma Mullonen. Both fiction and oral narratives come from two different dialectal areas of Ingrian Finnish, the East and the West of the Gatchina District, respectively. The study relied on corpus analysis whereby fiction and oral narrative texts were compared to each other and to the dialects they come from.

The study revealed the following characteristic features of the Ingrian Finnish subject reference. First, subject pronouns in Ingrian Finnish tend to be explicitly ex pressed in all persons, which distinguishes it from Standard Finnish where the 1st and 2nd person subject pronouns are usually omitted. At the same time, the Ingrian Finnish pattern differs from Russian, where pronouns are omitted much less frequently. Some pronominal features of Ingrian Finnish, such as the omission of the 3rd person pronouns in independent foreground narrative clauses may result from contacts with Russian. Second, a set of Ingrian Finnish verbs of speech and thinking are mostly used without an additional subject pronoun, which distinguishes the Ingrian Finnish situation from Russian, where the pronoun is usually expressed in such contexts. Third, while in past clauses of Ingrian Finnish oral narratives the 1st and 2nd person subject pronouns are usually expressed, in fiction prose they tend to be omitted. This difference can be explained both by the general pragmatics of the recording (pronouns were used as a marker of politeness, necessary for correct interaction between the speaker and the listener) and by its design (unlike in fiction examples, language consultants used longer clauses to provide more detail).