Avertive constructions in Finnish: A collostructional analysis

Abstract Avertives refer to (mainly past) situations the outcome of which is interrupted, averted, or frustrated instead of completed, as in Meinasin kaatua, mutta ihmeen kaupalla onnistuin pysymään jaloillani ‘I was about to fall, but miraculously managed to stay on my feet’. The aim of this paper is to describe and compare three verbal constructions in Finnish which are frequently used as avertives by means of collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003). We propose that these constructions, namely olla + mAisillA ‘to be V-ing’, olla + INF A ‘to be to V’, and meinata + INF A ‘to mean, intend to V’, which all correspond to ‘be about to do something’, constitute a family of related avertive constructions. We first describe them by means of collexeme analyses based on corpus data consisting of online written conversation extracted from the Suomi24 corpus. We then compare the constructions and situate them on Caudal’s (2023) continuum for characterising different kinds of avertive markers. Finally, we offer a box chart characterisation of the constructions at two distinct levels of schematicity, the schematic AUX + INF X construction and a specific usage instance of olla + INF A , following Fried & Östman (2004).