Early studies

The general category of definiteness first appears in Finnish grammar under the name of spesies ‘species’, a term introduced by Noreen (1904). (See Hirvonen 1980 and Vähämäki 1980 for general surveys.) Noreen had distinguished three categories of spesies for Swedish, which he called definite, indefinite and general. The Finnish Language Commission adopted the term spesies in their influential 1915 report, but defined the category as having only two members: definite and indefinite. Nouns whose referents were known or previously mentioned were said to have definite spesies, and nouns with referents which were unknown or not previously mentioned had indefinite spesies (Kielioppikomitean mietintö 6, 1915: 38). ‘Known’ was later redefined to include ‘known by virtue of the situation’.

From the start it was clear that ‘in Finnish there is no one way of expressing the category of spesies which could be compared e.g. to the articles of many Indo-European languages’ (Ahlman 1928: 134; my translation). Research therefore focused on discovering the range of grammatical devices which could be used to express this opposition of known vs unknown referent. The research strategy was basically what Catford (1965) would later call commutation: a given syntactic feature of a Finnish sentence was varied, resulting in two different English, German or Swedish translations, one with a definite and one with an indefinite article.