On spatial relationships in the Finnish language

The study presents a thorough review, conducted from a linguocultural perspective, of the primary principles used in expressing spatial relations in Finnish through linguistic categories and means. It covers the genesis and changes of cases in the Finnish language, paying special attention to those that conveyed spatial meaning at a particular stage of the language development. The issue is particularly interesting as there is an ongoing debate about the application of certain cases owing to the significant influence of dialects in Finnish, which is characterized by an egocentric spatial orientation. The study aimed to explore the instances of diverging spatial representations regarding the direction of actions in different linguocultures, with Finnish and Russian linguocultures taken as examples. The research applied a quantitative analysis approach to examine competing forms, with a corpus of YLE newspaper texts from 2011 to 2020 as the research material. The study analyzed instances of differing depictions through verb-noun pairs and verbs related to sensual and tangible perception (vaikutelmaverbit). Additionally, we investigated the variations in verb usage of the latter and the verb ‘käydä’ (‘to go, to visit’), which is generally presented as ‘static’, but expresses its dynamic qualities in different collocations. The analysis indicates that the system of spatial relations in Finnish is characterized by linguocultural specificity and is expressed grammatically through local and non-local case forms, prepositions, postpositions, and verb-noun syntactic structures. Furthermore, one and the same name in the internal and external case forms may convey not only distinct grammatical but also different lexical meanings. The use of local cases with certain verbs can lend expressions and verbs a figurative meaning that is only loosely connected to position in space.