The “bizarre” valency behaviour of Finnish verbs: How a specific context gives rise to valency alternation patterns

This paper discusses two cases of valency alternations in Modern Finnish that to our knowledge have not attracted much attention. We discuss sentences (a) in which a verb which is normally used intransitively, i.e. without an object, is used transitively, i.e. with an object, and (b) in which a transitive verb appears with a new type of object. To account for such sentences we propose a constructional approach: the effected object construction and the possessive transfer construction enable Finnish speakers to deviate from the conventional valency properties of verbs and use conventionally intransitive verbs transitively, or transitive verbs with objects that are not selected in the basic valency entries of the verbs.