Grammatical processes
Consonant gradation
EstonianAssibilation
Assibilation is a change that happened in Proto-Finnic: the sequence ''ti'' became ''si''. This change is no longer productive or predictable, but a fair number of nouns still display the effects in certain forms. The effect is visible in that sometimes ''s'' appears where there would otherwise be a ''t'' or ''d''. This also creates new variants of the gradation patterns mentioned above, with ''s'' appearing in some of the forms in both the strong and weak grade. For example: * ', genitive singular ', illative singular ', partitive plural '. * ', genitive singular ', illative singular ', partitive plural '. * ', genitive singular ', illative singular ', partitive plural '. * ', genitive singular ', illative singular ', partitive plural '. Also an example of another change that happened in some words, in which ''n'' disappeared before ''s''. Consequently, there is no ''n'' in the forms that have assibilation. * ', genitive singular '. Here, too, ''n'' disappeared before ''s''. * ', genitive singular ', illative singular '. In this particular case, ''ht'' becomes ''ks'' where assibilation occurred. * ', first-person singular present ', first-person singular past '. Same as above.Nouns
Inflectional endings as listed below are added to the stem of a noun, which is formed from: * singular genitive: singular cases except nominative and partitive, plural nominative, * singular partitive: plural genitive, * plural genitive: plural cases except nominative and partitive. SingularPronouns
* reflexive (nominative – genitive – partitive, singular / ''plural''): ' / (-self) * demonstrative (nominative – genitive – partitive, singular / plural): ' (this/that), ' (yonder) * interrogative (nominative – genitive – partitive): ' (who), ' (what), ' (which out of many), ' (which out of two) * existential (nominative – genitive – partitive): ' (someone), ' (something), ' (some), ' (one) * free choice (nominative – genitive – partitive): ' (anyone/anything/any), ' (either) * universal (nominative – genitive – partitive): ' (everyone/everything/each), ' (both)Cases
There are traditionally considered to be 14 noun cases in Estonian: Locative cases make up six or eight of these fourteen (depending on interpretation). There are also some additional cases such as the instructive (, "by foot"; , "by hand"), or the similarly formed prolative (, "by the way of the sea"), which are not traditionally counted among the 14 grammatical cases.Adjectives
Inflection and derivation
Inflectional endings are added to the stem of an adjective, which is formed like the one for nouns. However, adjectives do not have terminative, essive, abessive, and comitative cases. The stem for the comparative and superlative forms is the singular genitive of an adjective; if a word has two syllables in the genitive or a vowel following ', then ' is left out and the last vowel in the stem changes to '. The genitive and the partitive of the comparative itself are formed with ' and '. New adjectives can be derived from existing words by means of suffixes like:Articles
Estonian has no definite and indefinite articles. The function of the definite article can be performed by the demonstrative pronoun ' ‘this’; and the function of the indefinite article can be performed by the indefinite pronoun ', developed from the numeral ‘one’. (Pajusalu 2001)Agreement
Adjectival modifiers (including ordinals, demonstratives, and present participles) agree with their heads in case and number. In the terminative, essive, abessive, and comitative the modifier agrees only in number and remains in the genitive. See Case table above. Most modifiers occur in the pre-noun position: * a) demonstratives, e.g. ' ‘this man’; * b) adjectives, e.g. ' ‘old man’; * c) quantifiers, e.g. ' ‘two men’, ' ‘all men’; * d) participles, e.g. ' ‘a walking man’, * e) genitives, e.g. ' ‘brother’s book’, ' ‘Estonian language’; * f) some oblique-case substantive modifiers, e.g. ' ‘wooden house’, ' ‘beaked cap’. Post-noun substantive modifiers take the form of various kinds of adverbials, e.g. ' ‘the door to dwelling rooms’,' ‘the drive to town’, ' ‘conversation with friends’, ' ‘worry about children’, ' ‘key to success’, etc. The non-agreement of the last four cases in Estonian is the manifestation of postpositionality of the affixes of the above cases. Postpositionality implies that there is no need to repeat the case endings in coordinated phrases, e.g. ' ‘with a man and a woman’. The above affixes were treated as postpositions in earlier grammars, and some grammarians still follow this tradition. Only the comitative evolved directly from a postposition; the other cases followed suit.Pro-adjectives
* numeral (nominative – genitive – partitive, with noun in singular nominative for 1 and in singular partitive for others): ' (0), ' (1), ' (2), ' (3), ' (4), ' (5), ' (6), ' (7), ' (8), ' (9), ' (10), ' (11–19), ' (20–90), ' (100), ' (200–900), ' (1.000–999.000), ' (1.000.000–999.000.000), ' (1.000.000.000); ordinal: ' (1.), ' (2.), ' (3.), ''cardinal_genitive – cardinal_genitive – cardinal_genitive'' (others) * demonstrative (nominative – genitive – partitive, singular / plural): ' (this kind), ' (this/that), ' (yonder) * interrogative (nominative – genitive – partitive): ' (what kind), ' (which) * existential (nominative – genitive – partitive): ' (some kind), ' (some) * free choice (nominative – genitive – partitive): ' (any kind), ' (any) * universal (nominative – genitive – partitive): ' (every kind), ' (every)Adpositions
The following lists are not exhaustive.Verbs
The inflectional endings as listed below are added to the stem of a verb, which is formed from: * indicative mood active voice singular first person of positive present tense (by dropping '): indicative mood active voice of present tense, conditional mood active voice of present tense, imperative mood active voice singular second person of present tense, * ' infinitive (by dropping '; if the stem ends with a consonant, an additional ' is added in the singular third person of the imperfect or an additional ' is added in the singular nominative of the participle, the consonant is doubled if it was short and preceding a short vowel; if the stem ends with ' while being two-syllable or if it ends with a long vowel, then the ' is left out in all numbers and persons, ' is changed to ', a long vowel becomes short and ' are changed to '): indicative mood active voice of positive imperfect, quotative mode active voice of present tense, * ' infinitive (by dropping '; long final ' become short, in spoken language ' is shortened to '): indicative mood active voice of negative imperfect, indicative mood active voice of pluperfect, imperative mood active voice of present tense except singular second person, active voice of perfect, * participle of passive voice perfect (by dropping '): passive voice. Present tense form and ' participle are derived from the infinitives on the basis of gradation. ' infinitive indicates real action, i.e. action that does happen, has happened, or will happen. It can be declined: ' (illative), ' (inessive), ' (elative), ' (translative), ' (abessive). The verb that precedes it also usually implies real action: ‘accustomed to reading’, ‘I go to read’, ‘goes looking’, ‘I am ready/in agreement to help’, ‘I can manage’. ' infinitive indicates hypothetical action, i.e. the idea of the action rather than real action. It can be declined: ' (inessive). It is used in the following cases: * In a compound verb when it refers only to the idea of the action: ‘I want to sleep’, ‘I know how to read’, ‘I can start’, ‘you can ask’, ‘it could be felt in the air’, * In a subordinate clause that refers only to the idea of the action: ’in order to see better’, ‘if waking up tomorrow morning at six’, ‘if you think about it’. * As part of a participle where it refers only to the idea of the action: ‘able to be used’, ‘unpredictable’.Verb derivation
The following suffixes add meaning to a stem.Conjugation paradigms
List of endings
Emphasis: verb + ' (after a final voiced consonant or vowel) / ' (after a final voiceless consonant), verb + ' (positive), verb + ' (negative).Adverbs
Inflectional endings as listed below are added to the stem of an adverb, which is formed from: * singular genitive of an adjective ('): genetival type, * singular ablative of an adjective ('; some are declinable in allative, adessive, ablative): ablatival type. Some adverbs are special words – original or vestigial forms of an ancient instructive case. Pro-adverbs * demonstrative (illative/allative – inessive/adessive – elative/ablative): ' (here), ' (there), ' (now), ' (then), ' (thus), ' (therefore) * interrogative (illative/allative – inessive/adessive – elative/ablative): ' (where), ' (when), ' (how), ' (why) * existential (illative/allative – inessive/adessive – elative/ablative): ' (somewhere), ' (sometime), ' (somehow) * free choice (illative/allative – inessive/adessive – elative/ablative): ' (anywhere), ' (anytime), ' (anyhow) * universal (illative/allative – inessive/adessive – elative/ablative): ' (everywhere), ' (always)Syntax
The neutral word order in Estonian is subject–verb–object (SVO). However, as one would expect from anBasic clause patterns
There are two basic patterns of clauses in Estonian: normal and inverted clauses (cf. also Erelt 2003, 2005a). In a normal clause the basic word order is SVX (subject – verb – nonsubject). The subject is unmarked, that is, it stands in the nominative, and the verb usually agrees with the subject in person and number. An inverted clause has the word order XVS. The clause opens not with the subject but with an adverbial or oblique, experiential clauses with an object in exceptional cases. If there is a subject-NP in the clause, it is usually indefinite. If the subject-NP is a mass noun or a count noun in the plural, quantitative indefiniteness may be optionally marked by the partitive. (5,7) In the (non-contrastive) negative clause the use of the partitive is obligatory, (e.g. ex. 8). In clauses without a nominative subject the verb is always in the 3rd person singular. In the inverted clause ‘be’ is the most common verb. The main types of inverted clauses include existential, possessive, experiential clauses, clauses of state and source-marking resultative clauses. In existential clauses, as in (4)–(8), the clause-initial constituent is an adverbial of location (or time), and the clause performs a presentative function. In possessive clauses the possessor is expressed as a locative phrase. The latter is represented by the nominal in the adessive case (9). The possessor is typically animate, as in (9), but it may be also inanimate, as in ' ‘The car has four wheels’. Estonian makes no distinction in the expression of permanent and temporal possession. Occasionally, possessive constructions may be formed according to the model of normal clauses, that is, encoding the possessor as the subject and using a special verb, such as , ‘have’ (10). The frequency of the construction is on the increase. The pattern of the normal clause is also used to form the belong-possession, using the -verb and the genitive possessor together with the pronoun ' ‘one’s own’ (11) or the special -verb ‘belong’ (12). Experiential clauses can be formed according to the pattern of possessive clauses, so that the experiencer is expressed by the clause-initial oblique in the adessive, and the ‘possessed’ state is expressed by the subject-NP, as in (13). This kind of state can be expressed also by the predicate adjective (14). The inverted clause pattern is also used in the case of some experiential verbs. In the case of some of them (e.g. ‘like’) the experiencer has to be encoded as the allative oblique (15), in others ( ‘take an interest in’, ‘amaze’, etc.) as the direct object in the partitive case (16). Most experiential verbs take a nominative experiencer, that is, the normal clause pattern, as in (17). In clauses of “state” the clause-initial adverbial of location or time is optional. The predicate may be nominal, as in (18, 19), or verbal (20). The “source-marking resultative clause” (Erelt 2005b) is a marginal type of the resultative clause, where not the resultant state (goal) is marked, as in the normal resultative clause (22), but an entity that changes its state (21).Case marking
The Estonian language has no secondary orWord order in the clause
The basic word order in the normal clause is SVX, and in the inverted clause it is XVS. The word order is flexible, that is, pragmatic order variants are allowed in addition to the basic order. However, one can observe the following trends in the location of the verb. In non-negated declarative main clauses the finite verb tends to retain the second position in all the thematic variants (50–51) (cf.Negation
Clausal negation in Estonian is expressed by means of the negative particle , which usually precedes the verb, e.g. (67). The particle is historically the 3sg form of the previous negative auxiliary. Standard clausal negation is asymmetric, that is, the structure of the negative construction differs from the affirmative not only by the presence of the negative particle but in various other ways, too, first and foremost by the non-finiteness of the main verb (Miestamo 2000).Miestamo, Matti (2000): Symmetric and asymmetric Standard Negation, in: Nordic Journal of Linguistics 23, 65–88. In Estonian the main verb does not carry inflections of the person and the number appearing in the connegative form in the present and in the past participle in the past (see example 7. The other secondary modifications of standard negation include changes in case marking and word order. In a negative clause direct objects appear only in the partitive case. In the case of the inverted type of clause the same applies to the subject (cf. 2). The connegative form of the verb may be located at the end of the clause in negative clauses (cf. 6). In the imperative and the jussive prohibition is expressed by the partially inflected negative auxiliary (2sg), (2pl), (1pl), (3sg/pl) together with the imperative form of the main verb (68). Unlike the negative particle , the auxiliary verb may be separated from the main verb by other words (69). In the case of constituent negation the scope of negation is marked by emphasis and optionally by the negative particle (70, 71). The particle is placed immediately before the negated constituents, whereas the verb is optionally (but in the case of negated indefinites obligatorily) also in the negative form. The particle is also used to express negation within an infinitive clause (72). On DO Fronting: Constituent negation:Modifiers
SeeConjunctions
* ' (but) * ' (that) * ' (and) * ' (whether) * ' (if) * ' (as) * ' (because) * ' (or)References
* Moseley, C. (1994). ''Colloquial Estonian: A Complete Language Course''. London: Routledge. * Tuldava, J. (1994). ''Estonian Textbook: Grammar, Exercises, Conversation''. Bloomington: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University. {{Language grammars Estonian language Languages of Estonia Finnic languages Finnic grammars