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The issue of third-person pronoun use has been examined by several authors who delve into the intersection of language and relationships between humans and other animal species (see e.g. Dunayer 2001; Stibbe 2001). Valuable research on third-person pronoun variation in reference to nonhuman animals has recently been conducted in Finnish linguistics as well (Laitinen 2021; Priiki 2021). In third-wave sociolinguistic research (see Eckert 2012), however, the topic of pronoun variation in relation to interspecies relationships has not been extensively studied, despite the potential that lies in examining the role of pronoun variation in stylistic practice and therefore in the construction of identities, communities and relationships.
The use of Finnish third-person pronouns hän and se differs significantly between standardized language and dialectal and colloquial speech, which affects the way in which these pronouns are used in constructing meaning. In standardized Finnish, hän refers exclusively to human and se to nonhuman referents (such as nonhuman animals or inanimate objects). Colloquial and dialectal speech are more flexible in this regard; both hän and se are used for both human and nonhuman referents, and se is in fact more commonly used in reference to humans than hän. In colloquial speech, hän is most commonly used logophorically, i.e. in reported speech or to interpret the thoughts, perceptions, intentions or feelings of the referent or to express the role of participants in an interaction, the latter functions being extensions of logophoricity. (Laitinen 2005; Priiki 2017.)
In this ongoing study, I adopt a novel approach by examining the construction of interspecies relationships through the variation between the third-person singular pronouns hän and se in online forum discussions. I use a subcorpus compiled from a corpus of over 4 billion tokens containing all messages from the Finnish online forum Suomi24 posted between 2001 and 2020 (City Digital Group 2021). This subcorpus (approx. 113 million tokens) includes messages from a pet-themed subforum, and another subcorpus with messages from a general discussion subforum is used as a reference corpus (approx. 229 million tokens).
The study incorporates methods of corpus-assisted discourse studies (Baker 2023) into critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2013), combining quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how the two pronouns function in online interaction to construct discourses of interspecies relationships, as well as whether their use has changed on the forum between 2001 and 2020. By exploring issues relating to interspecies relationships, the study is also situated in the field of ecolinguistics, i.e. the linguistic study of topics related to environmental and interspecies issues, which also frequently adopts a critical perspective (Stibbe 2014).
The approach I take to study the role of pronoun variation in interspecies linguistics is methodologically exploratory, as corpus methods have not been used extensively in Finnish linguistic study of interspecies relationships or third-person pronoun use. In addition, the study aims to build bridges between different theoretical and methodological frameworks, combining corpus-assisted and critical discourse studies to third-wave sociolinguistics and ecolinguistics.