puhutaanviitataan

Puhutaanviitataan is a term used in discourse analysis to describe a specific interplay between talk acts and referential indexing in Finnish. It denotes a practice in which the act of talking about something simultaneously signals how that thing is being referred to within the discourse, thereby shaping its referential frame.

Origin and usage: The term is a Finnish neologism formed by combining puhutaan (it is spoken about/one speaks) and viitataan (it is referred to). It is not part of standard Finnish lexical resources but appears in scholarly discussions about metapragmatics and reference in contemporary Finnish media and conversation.

Theoretical background: Puhutaanviitataan ties into indexicality and deixis in that the referential expression used for a referent can depend on the discourse context and the speech act. It highlights how pronouns, names, and descriptive phrases jointly contribute to reference and how the act of mentioning influences which expression is chosen.

Domains of study: It is used by researchers studying news discourse, political communication, and everyday conversation to analyze how referents are introduced, tracked, and re-identified across talk. The concept helps describe sequencing patterns where initial mentions set up a referent and subsequent mentions re-anchor or modify that reference.

Examples: In Finnish, a passage may first refer to a person with a pronoun (hän) and later anchor the reference with a proper name; this sequence exemplifies puhutaanviitataan. In English: The article discusses the mayor; she is quoted, and later she is identified as Mayor Ranta.

See also: discourse analysis, metapragmatics, deixis, anaphora, referential expression.