Nothing is coming readily to mind.... "Space" seems to be used in a more general way, while "place" and, I guess, "stead" are at least a little more specific...??AldenG wrote:Rob, can you think of any context in English where we would use "space" in the meaning of place or stead? Whether we were talking about the forest or the juice-and-wine or any kind of substitution or 1st place, 2nd place, etc., those almost always turn into something like "in its place," or "instead" or "in its stead," don't they? Or maybe I'm just drawing a blank today.
Well...I'm not there yet...AldenG wrote:So in the idiomatic meanings of tilalle, tilalla, sijasta, sijaan, we'd have to use "place" or "stead," do you think?
I guess I need more Finnish examples.... How about: "Bill parked his car in my space."...That does sound specific though, despite what I said above. And "space" here has a two dimensional sense to it. You could say: "Bill parked his car in my place.", but that sounds a bit awkward....Something an ulkomaalainen might say.... It conjures up images of Bill parking his car inside someone's house. Using the preposition, "at", wouldn't help clarify things, except we would now be thinking the car was parked next to someone's house....
Well....I use all of this as a kind of "forcefeeding" technique to drive home these various ideas...hoping that some of it will actually be incorporated into my knowledge of Finnish ...AldenG wrote:Replacement, rather than the refilling of space, seems to me the necessary interpretation of the sentence Uutta metsää kasvoi hakatun tilalle. Then again, maybe Jukka will say I'm mistaken. Or the author citing Hakanen and Itkonen would say so. At the very least, this sentence seems really poorly chosen to illustrate his point. Even if the physical space is a viable interpretation, it surely cannot be the default interpretation. (?) And usage wouldn't have changed that much in 30 years, would it? He seems to go out of his way to say the sentence is about re-occupying the physical location rather than replacing the existence of the cleared trees. Personally I see nothing in the sentence that contradicts the possibility that 1 acre was cut on th edge of the woods and a new acre grew up, halfway but not fully overlapping the original acre. The main point is that there is a replacement acre, not its precise location. I can even imagine a scenario where the sentence is talking about two physically disjoint patches in a single large holding. I just don't see that tila=space is the default interpretation in that sentence. So the spatial argument that follows is a bit perpendicular. It needed to use an example that didn't incorporate such a fixed idiom that changed the frame of reference to an abstract one.
But to emphasize that the clearing is no longer empty and spacious because new growth has filled it, in English we would need to use "space" to avoid confusion about the exact meaning. "New trees appeared in place of the cleared ones" isn't ambiguous in meaning. It talks about existential replacement, not location. To get the other meaning, we'd have to say "New trees grew in the space the cleared ones had occupied" or "New trees popped up in the same place the old ones had been cut."
I just re-read all of page 1 and some of the linked material and I am more confused (while blissfully indifferent) about the true definition of an existential sentence than before. And about why it should matter.
And I suppose the only relevance to all this is the same as in English.... the difference between saying: "The children are playing in the yard."...and: "There are children playing in the yard.".... The first sentence, to a certain degree, invites a response....the second is merely stating the "existence" of some fact. It has a more passive sense to it, and I would think a person would feel that a response is optional....
