Fixed and Free: Order of the Verbal Predicate and Its Core Arguments in Declarative Transitive Clauses in Finnish Sign Language

The study presented in this article deals with the order of the verbal predicate (V) and its nominal core arguments (Aand P-argument) in declarative transitive clauses in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). A central finding of the study was that at the macro level of FinSL transitive clauses are not ordered in one unambiguous way, but at least three structural combinations of the verbal and its core arguments are possible: AVP, APV, and PAV. The type of clause was found to affect sign order in that isolated clauses only occurred with the orders AVP and APV, whereas textual clauses also manifested the order PAV, or even involved omission of the core arguments. At the micro level, however, sign order in FinSL showed regular patterns similar to those found in other sign languages: (i) A-argument was always expressed before V, and there was also a strong tendency to express A-argument before P-argument; (ii) verbal initial structures were not used; and (iii) verbals including a classifier morpheme – i.e. verbals on the basis of which FinSL could be identified as a head-marking language – were placed at the end of the sentence. The article also discusses the extent to which the clause is an appropriate unit to be used in the future description of FinSL.