The possessive perfect construction in Estonian

Liina Lindström; Ilona Tragel

doi:10.1515/flin.2010.014

Article

The possessive perfect construction in Estonian

Liina Lindström and Ilona Tragel

Published/Copyright: December 8, 2010

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From the journal Volume 44 Issue 2

Estonian, a Finno-Ugric language, is usually considered not to have a possessive perfect (have-perfect). In this article, we argue that there is a construction which is functionally similar to the have-perfect in many European languages. It is based on a possessive construction, as with the have-perfect in other European languages, but since the Estonian possessive construction is based on a location schema, it is different from constructions in other European languages in terms of the morphosyntactic means it employs. We describe the grammaticalization of the construction and its relation to others that use these same morphosyntactic means, that is, impersonal and passive constructions. Though all these constructions seem rather similar, the possessive perfect belongs to neither the impersonal nor the passive paradigm. The meaning of the possessive perfect is mainly resultative, and it seems to be motivated by the meaning of the passive past participle which is a part of the construction.

Keywords:: possessive perfect; grammaticalization; passive; impersonal; passive past participle; Estonian language

Received: 2009-02-19

Revised: 2009-07-10

Accepted: 2009-09-05

Published Online: 2010-12-08

Published in Print: 2010-December

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2010.014

Keywords for this article

possessive perfect; grammaticalization; passive; impersonal; passive past participle; Estonian language