Siihen saakka piti vaan koettaa kestää…: Zur Verwendung von offener Personenreferenz in finnischer Prosa und ihrer Übersetzung ins Deutsche

In this article, open personal reference in Finnish is studied on a corpus of extracts from three Finnish novels and their German translations. The aim is to find out how expressions creating open reference are used in Finnish prose, how they get translated into German and how the references are  interpreted. The term open reference is used for expressions that imply a personal (human) referent without specifying it, so that the reference needs to be construed from the situational and/or textual context. The Finnish constructions with open reference studied here include the open 3rd person singular (“zero person”), the passive, verbs of necessity as well as regular person forms. A multi-method approach, complementing morphosyntactic analyses with framesemantic annotation and a  readers’ survey, serves to combine insights on open reference from different angles. Frame semantics in the cognitive linguistics tradition of Charles Fillmore offers a framework to operationalize the role of contextual information and encyclopaedic knowledge for text comprehension and reference  interpretation. The analyses show that the implied referents of Finnish passive constructions are typically AGENTS of volitional actions, while expressions with the open 3rd person singular tend to evoke frames of necessity and desirability. In the German texts, the generic pronoun man is used as a referential expression in almost half of all cases. It appears as a translation equivalent for both the Finnish passive and the open 3rd person singular, especially with referents fulfilling a semantic role other that AGENT, such as COGNIZER, as well as in modal contexts. The survey among Finnish native speakers indicates an overall high degree of agreement in the interpretation of references. Disagreement was found especially for examples containing the open 3rd person singular form, pointing at the duality of its referential potential, encompassing both an individual referent known from context and generic reference.