Is the FROM construction community-specific? The coalescence of Finnish cases and Swedish and Spanish prepositions in the Helsinki metropolitan area

Multilingual speakers often display what has traditionally been considered linguistic interference. It is well known that Finnish influences the language use of speakers of other languages, such as Swedish. This study focuses on how Finnish the FROM-cases elative and ablative affect the linguistic patterns of Spanish and Swedish speakers. Due to the lack of corpus data for Helsinki Spanish and relevant examples in available Finland-Swedish corpora, we elicited language samples by asking participants to describe video clips depicting scenarios like “buying something from a store” or “climbing out (from) a window.” Our aim is to assess how Swedish and Spanish speakers’ prepositional choices reflect the conceptualization exemplified by the Finnish way of using the FROM construction. We propose that the converging usage patterns we observe indicate the existence of a common FROM construction among speakers residing in the Helsinki metropolitan area.