Agreement or crystallization: Patterns of 1st and 2nd person subjects and verbs of cognition in Finnish conversational interaction

• The article studies the patterning of verbs of cognition with different kinds of subjects in Finnish conversation.
• It is shown that there is a tendency for verbs of cognition to co-occur with 1st person singular pronominal subjects in Finnish.
• There are several recurring patterns with certain verbs of cognition.
• These patterns are based on regular grammatical processes such as agreement, but at the same time, they exhibit certain features of crystallization.

Discourse studies indicate a tendency for verbs of cognition to co-occur with 1st person subjects. This article looks more closely into the patterning of verbs of cognition with different kinds of subjects in Finnish conversation. Based on a morphosyntactically coded database of conversational Finnish, I show that there are several recurring patterns with verbs of cognition which can be viewed as “emergent discourse patterns” (cf. Scheibman, 2002) or prefabs (Bybee, 2006). The analysis suggests that crystallization of recurrent patterns does in fact occur; this crystallization, however, shows features that are specific to individual verbs and types of subject (zero vs. pronominal vs. full NP). Also relevant are polarity and tense. It is shown that the components of these prefabs retain associations with other occurrences of the lexical elements of the components. Furthermore, the prefabs are associated with the more general constructions from which they arose. Thus, the patterns in question are based on regular grammatical processes such as agreement, but at the same time, exhibit certain features of crystallization.