Receipting information as newsworthy vs. responding to redirection: Finnish news particles aijaa and aha(a)

This paper compares two Finnish change-of-state tokens, aijaa and aha, that share the same basic epistemic meaning: they treat the prior talk as new information. It will be shown that they differ with respect to what status they assign to the prior informing in the larger activity context and the import of the informing for the particle speaker's project. That is, aijaa treats the prior informing as newsworthy and thus worthy of further discussion, whereas aha receives informings that redirect the on-going talk in a way that has consequences for the aha speaker's project and thus requires reorientation. The general aim of the paper is to identify relevant parameters for distinguishing between change-of-state tokens in a language that has an abundance of elements for this purpose.