Some observations on distance measurement words in Finnish and Swedish

Abstract

The paper presents an overview of words denoting units of measurement in the Finnish and Swedish languages. Comparative studies between these two languages seem relevant because they have been used in the neighboring regions and countries with a long history of political, cultural, and people-to-people interaction. First, the study describes metalexemes of space and distance in Swedish and Finnish. Next, using thesauri, topical dictionaries and corpora, the study applies the combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to identify and evaluate pragmatics and communication context for utterances of measure words. Then, the paper identifies several categories of measurement words in the languages, taking etymology into consideration, such as traditional measures, SI-units, foreign units and analyzes their use in the contexts of corpora representing modern discourse. The paper highlights the differences and similarities in how Swedish and Finnish use different categories of the vocabulary items. The detailed analysis of contexts provides observations about collocations and topics of news where these measure words occur. Moreover, the study addresses the impact of Swedish and Russian on Finnish, due to the historical and political circumstances. According to the data studied, the study infers that Finnish and Swedish use all types of measurement words. However, the frequency, contexts of the occurrences and speech situations differ. Some categories tend to be used in a limited amount of topics, while others have no restrictions in usage. The study is expected to contribute to practical dimensions of working with the languages, namely teaching and translation.