Grammaticalization of Estonian saama ‘to get’
-
Ilona Tragel,
and
Külli Habicht,
Abstract
This paper presents an overview of the history and usage of the Estonian verb saama ‘to get’. We take the grammaticalization approach which posits that, diachronically, the language unit undergoing grammaticalization becomes more and more abstract, both semantically and functionally. Here we present the grammaticalization story of what was originally a motion verb, which becomes a modal and future auxiliary through various transitional stages.
Among the lexical meanings of the verb saama, succeed, possess, and become are the most important in modern Estonian. Among the grammatical functions, the modal uses stand out: the auxiliary verb saama together with the da-infinitive (inf1) of the main verb are used in constructions expressing both participant-internal and participant-external possibility and necessity as well as in epistemic constructions. Furthermore, the present article addresses the resultative-passive constructions of saama with the active past participle (app/-nud) and passive past participle (ppp/-tud). We present the process of grammatical replication that took place during the period of older Estonian (16th to 19th century) under the influence of German as a contact language. In the translations of religious texts from this period, the verb saama was introduced into written Estonian as a fully grammaticalized auxiliary verb expressing future.
©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- The art of getting: GET verbs in European languages from a synchronic and diachronic point of view: Introduction
- Noncanonical passives revisited: Parameters of nonactive Voice
- The GET constructions of Modern Irish and Irish English: GET-passive and GET-recipient variations
- What you give is what you GET? On reanalysis, semantic extension and functional motivation with the German bekommen-passive construction
- The verb krijgen ‘to get’ as an undative verb
- The BECOME=CAUSE hypothesis and the polysemy of get
- Norwegian få ‘get’: A survey of its uses in present-day Riksmål/Bokmål
- Semantic extension and language contact: The case of Irish faigh ‘get’
- Grammaticalization of Estonian saama ‘to get’
- Language-specific meanings in contrast: A corpus-based contrastive study of Swedish få ‘get’
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- The art of getting: GET verbs in European languages from a synchronic and diachronic point of view: Introduction
- Noncanonical passives revisited: Parameters of nonactive Voice
- The GET constructions of Modern Irish and Irish English: GET-passive and GET-recipient variations
- What you give is what you GET? On reanalysis, semantic extension and functional motivation with the German bekommen-passive construction
- The verb krijgen ‘to get’ as an undative verb
- The BECOME=CAUSE hypothesis and the polysemy of get
- Norwegian få ‘get’: A survey of its uses in present-day Riksmål/Bokmål
- Semantic extension and language contact: The case of Irish faigh ‘get’
- Grammaticalization of Estonian saama ‘to get’
- Language-specific meanings in contrast: A corpus-based contrastive study of Swedish få ‘get’
