Resumen de Instrumentals and implicit causal and conditional relations with special reference to Finnish
In their prototypical function, instrumentals are modifiers indicating an entity that is used by a volitional, typically animate agent in transmitting a force to a patient (e.g. Father crushed the coconut with a hammer). Such Instrumentals have a central role in the volitional relation expressed by the verb, and differ, in this sense, from many other types of modifiers that have a more peripheral role in indicating the setting of the event (so-called setting adverbial.) There are, however, instrumentals that fulfill less prototypical semantic functions, especially in sentences where no volitional agent is indicated. This paper argues that nonprototypical instrumentals can be divided into two subclasses, cause and conditional instrumentals. Cause instrumentals are most typical in sentences with an inanimate subject, e.g. The rope cut with a knife, where the instrument (the knife) is not used by the referent of the subject (the rope) but typically (but not always) precedes it in the causal relation and implies the existence of an external agent who uses the instrument and participates in the relation. Conditional instrumentals in turn establish a conditional or hypothetical frame of the use of the instrument. They remain outside the relation expressed by the verb and serve a semantic function that is typical of a setting adverbial. In this paper I seek to establish, using data from Finnish, that cause instrumentals and conditional instrumentals (collectively designated as domain instrumentals) may be distinguished from prototypical instrumentals by their syntactic behavior as well as by their semantic properties.
