Investigation into the linguistic category membership of the Finnish planning particle tota

Abstract

Abstract Even though hesitations (e.g., um/uh) were historically perceived as involuntary non-linguistic items (e.g., Maclay & Osgood 1959), more recently, a number of scholars have suggested that hesitations can behave like (a) lexical items (e.g., Clark & Fox Tree 2002), and (b) at least in some contexts and with some functions as grammatical items like suffixes/clitics (Kirjavainen, Crible & Beeching 2022; Tottie 2017). The current study contributes to this body of work and presents two spoken language corpus analyses (frequency analysis; network analysis) investigating the nature of the Finnish planning particle tota. Our results suggest that tota is more similar to grammatical items than lexical items.