Volume 62, Issue 1-2

The paper presents a concise overview of the main syntactic features of Estonian. It deals with basic clause patterns, case marking of arguments, verbs and verb categories, non-verbal predication, word order, expression of speech acts and negation, noun phrases, p-phrases, subordinate clauses, and coordination.

Estonian has features characteristic to both agglutinative and inflectional languages. The paper outlines in more detail the standing of different morphological subsystems on the inflective – agglutinative – analytic scale and characterises the strategies Estonian uses to express the values for some core grammatical categories. It is concluded that Estonian verbal morphology is more agglutinative than nominal and adjectival morphology. The somewhat weaker grammaticalisation of verbal morphology indicates that Estonian is not action oriented, but rather object-oriented. The well grammaticalised moods, particularly the ones expressing evidentiality and a rather weakly grammaticalised tense and missing aspect further characterises Estonian verbal morphology as conversationally rather than temporarily organised.

Estonian has in the course of historical changes become more distant from the other Finnic languages and has acquired some features of Indo-European and/or Standard Average European. The article compares some structural features between Estonian, Finnish, Standard Average European, and German and Russian. Estonian and Finnish have grown apart typologically while retaining their main structure and are to the same extent peripheral with regard to SAE. At the same time there are some morpho-syntacic features where Estonian has become more distant from Finnish not in the direction of SAE but in the direction of German or Russian. In both languages the central SAE features are represented on a more moderate scale than the secondary features. Both languages, especially Estonian, reveal some tendencies towards SAE features.

This article discusses the two main Estonian voice constructions, the impersonal and the 'resultative′ passive, and their status in the grammatical system of Estonian. Both constructions are subject-oriented; however, the passive is a valence-reducing operation, while the impersonal merely constrains argument realization. Both constructions are subject to distinctive lexical, syntactic and semantic constraints. A comparison of the role of these constructions in Estonian demonstrates that passive constructions need not be treated as universal and that languages can employ different grammatical means to achieve very similar communicative results. The fact that impersonals in Estonian and in other languages are frequently misclassified as passives shows how typological biases can distort grammatical descriptions. The comparison of impersonals and passives in Estonian also shows how constructions can differ in terms of whether they are sensitive to subjects at 'logical′ or 'grammatical′ levels of analysis.

Most previous approaches to the acquisition of morphology have focused on the acquisition of inflectional morphology of some Indo-European language; there are fewer studies on the acquisition of languages with a rich morphological system, in-cluding the Finno-Ugric languages. Among the Finno-Ugric languages the acquisition of Estonian has been a largely neglected area. The article discusses the impact of the typological peculiarity of a language on the acquisition of the inflectional morphology of Estonian. At first some assumptions will be made concerning the impact of the general richness of the Estonian morphological system on the speed of the acquisition of inflectional morphology followed by the analyses of the acquisition of individual typologically relevant features. The article discusses the acquisition of inflectional and analytic means of expression, the acquisition of gradation as a typologically relevant feature of Estonian, the acquisition of the lexical aspect of Estonian, and the acquisition of the case of the object as the principal means of expressing the aspect. The conclusions are based on the data from the previous articles by the author and the Estonian subcorpus of Vija, Argus, and Triplets in CHILDES.

The sound system of the Estonian language reveals a number of peculiar features untypical of the Finno-Ugric languages. The development of these features has been influenced by language contacts in the circum-Baltic linguistic area. Even today one can notice a number of systematic changes in Estonian phonology, the causes of which could be explained by language contacts, but the realization of which follows typological constraints of the language structure. The article focuses on such innovations in Estonian vowel and consonant systems, and prosody.

The article gives an overview of functions of Estonian frequent pronouns (demonstratives, personal, indefinite and quantificational pronouns) from typological point of view. Both deictic and anaphoric usages are discussed. The main purpose of the article is to present categories which influence the choice of a pronoun for the particular point of ongoing discourse. These categories are: activation status and animacy of the referent, pragmatic contrast, type of syntactic construction, definiteness/indefiniteness of the noun phrase, the status of the referred person in the ongoing narrative and pragmatic plenitude (for quantificational pronouns).

This paper discusses the development of expressions such as “who/God knows wh” into negative degree adverbs in Estonian. The study provides an answer to the question of how certain negative polarity items emerge in a language. This question is rarely answered in the literature focused on polarity; hence, the case-study at hand is an attempt to contribute to the general understanding of the grammaticalization/lexicalization of polarity items. Two issues are studied in detail: first, the pragmatic prerequisites, and second, the structural idiosyncrasies triggering the lexicalization of these types of expressions into NPIs. The insights obtained allow challenging the view (see VON BERGEN & VON BERGEN 1993: 130) according to which the historical change in the meaning of the linguistic elements is not relevant for the synchronic description of polarity items.