Aggressive mood

For other uses, see Aggressive (disambiguation).

The aggressive (Finnish: aggressiivi) is a grammatical mood-like verb construction that occurs in the Finnish language, especially in emotional outbursts. The construction expresses negation and resembles a negative clause, but it lacks the Finnish negative auxiliary. Instead, the aggressive is often marked with an expletive, which tends to be seen as a distinctive feature of the construction.

The aggressive has vogue particularly in the vernacular of the youth, but the characteristic absence of the negative auxiliary has also been found in samples of dialectal Finnish recorded in the early 20th century.[1] Even though the construction is quite common in colloquial Finnish, little attention has been paid to it in Finnish grammars, as it has mostly been regarded as an exceptional variant of the negative clause.[2]

Characteristics

The characteristics of the aggressive were analyzed by Lari Kotilainen in his doctoral dissertation in 2007. According to Kotilainen, the aggressive is an affective and reactive construction where the negative auxiliary is omitted and the main verb tends to be at the end. In addition, there is often an expletive at the beginning and the construction tends to include a semi-negative word – typically mitään '[not] anything', which can be analyzed as a pronoun or an adverb. More specifically, Kotilainen has identified four main varieties of the construction[2] (below, nearly word-by-word translations into English are given with extra clarifications in square brackets):

(Vittu) mä mitään tiedä! '(Fuck) I anything know [not]!'
Vittu mä mitään tiedän! 'Fuck I anything know [fuck I don't know anything]!'
Paskat tiedän! 'Shit [if] I know!'
Mä paskat välitän siitä! 'I shit care about it [I don't give a shit]!'

Origin of the term

In his dissertation, Kotilainen does not directly refer to the construction as "the aggressive", but he mentions that such a name has been used of the negative construction without the negative auxiliary. Elsewhere, he has himself repeatedly used it to refer to a negative construction that includes no negative auxiliary.[3]

The Finnish term aggressiivi first appeared in a parody of linguistic argumentation written by Jaakko Häkkinen in 1999. It was coined as a portmanteau of the adjective aggressiivinen 'aggressive' and the noun egressiivi (referring to the completely unrelated egressive case of the Komi language).[4] Häkkinen's pseudo-scientific definition describes the aggressive as a recently discovered affective negative verb mood. The verb in the construction is morphologically in the indicative mood, but Häkkinen's description claims that it is typical for the "aggressive mood" to prefix the morpheme vittu ('fuck', literally 'cunt' but largely diluted owing to its high frequency in the vernacular of many people) to a pronoun that functions as the grammatical subject of the clause (vittumä sinne mene 'fuck-I there go [fuck I won't go there]') or, alternatively, to a pronoun in a locative case (vittusiellä ketään ole 'fuck-there anybody is [fuck there won't be anybody there]').

Häkkinen's joke was first published in Siulaset, the zine of the students of Finnish and Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Helsinki, and later republished in Suomen Kuvalehti (1/2000), a magazine in nationwide circulation. Since then, the joke has been posted and reposted on various Internet forums, but often with additions that miss the original idea of a verb mood and focus on the use of the expletive. Sometimes the aggressive has mistakenly been described as a grammatical case or part of speech.[5]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Aggressiivi leviää suomen kielessä 13 December 2007, updated 24 May 2012. Yle. Accessed 7 December 2012.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Kotilainen, Lari: 978-952-10-4442-7 Konstruktioiden dynamiikkaa 2007. University of Helsinki, Department of Finnish language and literature. Accessed 12 March 2012.
  3. ↑ Kotilainen, Lari & Varteva, Annukka: Mummonsuomi laajakaistalla. Helsinki: WSOY, 2006. ISBN 951-0-31983-X.
  4. ↑ Häkkinen, Jaakko: Aggressiivin alkuperä. Accessed 5 March 2013.
  5. ↑ Räisänen, Mirja: Kieltä muokataan myös tarkoitushakuisesti. Kirjatyö 1/2007. (As preserved in the Internet Archive 26 April 2008. Accessed 12 March 2012.)

External links