Virve-Anneli Vihman

University of Tartu · Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics

This study of morphological overabundance focuses on the (non-)synonymy of parallel forms in Estonian illative case (‘into’) and the type of entrenchment behind it. We focus on the lexical level, testing whether the form preferred for a lexeme depends on semantic or morphophonological factors, or both. Using multifactorial regression analyses, we c...

Eleven out of fourteen Estonian nominal cases are generally regarded as semantic cases, rather than grammatical, but some are more grammaticalised (i.e. less semantic) than others. These can be said to be (semi-)grammatical cases, carrying both semantic and syntactic functions. This study focusses on elative and allative case, which stand out among...

In this paper we investigate the use of parallel forms, or morphological overabundance, in Estonian nouns, which are richly inflected in fourteen cases and two numbers. The complexity of the nominal inflection system derives from the multiplicity of declension classes, which allow for the availability of parallel forms in many morphological paradig...

In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study investigating the distribution of the three grammatical cases in Estonian (nominative, genitive, partitive) and the factors affecting the interpretation of syntactic role for nouns marked in these cases. Unlike previous studies, which have focussed on the properties of grammatical relations, w...

This paper presents a remote method used for engaging teenagers as citizen sociolinguists within the research project Teen Speak in Estonia. The project, launched in January 2020, aims to investigate young people’s language by creating the first systematic dual corpus of Estonian teenagers’ spoken language and text messaging. Previously, youth lang...

This study focuses on Estonian verb-complement structures, which include oblique (non-canonically marked) complements marked in spatial cases. Not all approaches agree on whether canonical arguments and oblique complements have argument status of the same type, but they do mostly agree that the two types of complement markings are used by different...

Keelepuude märkamine kakskeelsetel lastel on keeruline: lapse raskusi põhjendatakse kakskeelsusega või kakskeelsele lapsele omast arengut peetakse keelepuudeks. Vaja on objektiivseid hindamisvahendeid. Uuringu eesmärk on selgitada välja lausemallid ja laused laste keeletöötlusvõimet hindava lausete järelekordamistesti jaoks. Testis sisalduvad lause...

We present an exploratory study of 2- to 3-year-old children’s acquisition of the demonstrative system of Eegimaa (ISO 369–3 bqj), an endangered language belonging to the Jóola cluster of the Atlantic family of the Niger-Congo phylum, spoken by about 13,000 speakers in southwestern Senegal. Eegimaa demonstratives express distance from speaker (prox...

Artiklis esitatud uurimus annab esimese ülevaate eestinorra laste nimisõnafraasi grammatilisest struktuurist nii eesti kui ka norra keeles võrreldes ükskeelsetega mõlemas keeles. Analüüsis on erilise tähelepanu all nähtused, mida võib selgitada teise keele mõjutustega. Uurimuse valimi moodustasid kaheksa kakskeelset last vanuses 5–8 aastat, ükskeel...

Research on lesser-studied languages is vital for the advancement of theories of language acquisition. We discuss two areas where data from Eegimaa has the potential to produce innovative research: (1) language typology, with an overview of the complex demonstratives found in this language, and (2) learning environment and input speech. Here, we sh...

Artiklis analüüsime inglise keele kasutust projekti „Teismeliste keel Eestis“ (TeKE)1 raames 9–18-aastaste noorte suulisest ja tšätisuhtlusest kogutud keeleandmetes. Andmeid koguti rahvateaduse meetodil. Nagu TeKE korpuse sagedusandmed ja neist kooruvad mustrid viitavad, tasub teismeliste keelekasutuses pöörata tähelepanu inglise keelele. Artiklis...

Aims This study investigated three- to five-year-olds’ ability to generalise knowledge of case inflection to novel nouns in Estonian, which has complex morphology and lacks a default declension pattern. We explored whether Estonian-speaking children use similar strategies to adults, and whether they default to a preferred pattern or use analogy to...

This paper investigates clausal constituent order in Estonian, a language often described in the literature as exhibiting a verb-second “tendency”. We present a corpusbased study of ordering in independent affirmative declarative clauses, drawing data from both written and spoken corpora. Our results show that, while written Estonian is robustly a...

In this paper, we focus on three cases in Estonian (nominative, partitive, genitive) that are used to mark core arguments (subject, object, possessor). We address fundamental questions about the concept of case, including whether abstract case should be related to morphologically overt case. We strive to bring together formal analyses of case with...

Most, if not all, languages exhibit “animacy effects”: grammatical structures interact with the relative animacy of noun referents, as represented on various versions of animacy scales, with human discourse participants at one end and inanimate objects at the other. Cross-linguistic evidence attests to a range of linguistic phenomena conditioned by...

The aim of this large-scale, preregistered, cross-linguistic study was to mediate between theories of the acquisition of inflectional morphology, which lie along a continuum from rule-based to analogy-based. Across three morphologically rich languages (Polish, Finnish and Estonian), 120 children (mean age 48.32 months, SD = 7.0 months) completed an...

Linguistic animacy reflects a particular construal of biological distinctions encountered in the world, passed through cultural and cognitive filters. This study explores the process by which our construal of animacy becomes encoded in the grammars of human languages. We ran an iterated learning experiment investigating the effect of animacy on lan...

This paper examines the morphological integration of nouns in bilingual children’s code-switching to investigate whether children adhere to constraints posited for adult code-switching. The changing nature of grammars in development makes the Matrix Language Frame a moving target; permeability between languages in bilinguals undermines the concept...

In the children’s film Toy Story, toys spring to life when their human owners are away, creating an alternative world of transferred animacy relations signalled by visual and linguistic cues. The storylines and characters explore the nature of animacy and relationships between conspecifics and ‘others’. Our analysis focuses on the use of referring...

On the basis of a set of discourse completion tasks, forms of making requests and asking for information in various contexts in five languages with various mutual contacts and areal affiliations are investigated. The study shows what young Estonian, Finnish, French, Lithuanian and Russian speakers consider to be appropriate forms of making requests...

"Issues in morphological annotation of the Estonian child language corpus" This article presents the results of an initial attempt to automatically annotate the currently existing, publicly available Estonian child language corpus morphologically. CLAN software is not suitable for morphological analysis of Estonian, but Estonian language technolog...

In recent years, interest in the study of language policy issues in the context of universities has grown considerably. One reason for this is the coexistence of two apparently contradictory discourses, centring around nationalising and globalising orientations. Universities are seen by many as the key institutions for safeguarding the sustainabili...

In this paper, we tackle the twin issues of obligatoriness of semantic arguments and variation in their expression through a study of Estonian constructions denoting need. The variation under investigation consists in the choice of case-marking, between adessive and allative case, as well as the option to omit the oblique argument. We extracted and...

This paper examines the code-switching of verbs in the speech of two children bilingual in Estonian and English (aged 3 to 7). Verbs typically have lower rates of code-switching than nouns, due to their central role in argument structure, lower semantic specii city, and greater morphological complexity. The data examined here show various types of...

This paper compares the forms of expression of core verbal arguments in estonian child-directed speech (CDS) with those in estonian speech between adults (ADS).The data, consisting of nearly 600 utterances, is taken from a mother speaking to her two-year-old child, and two adult women speaking to each other. The analysis confirms the observation th...

This paper examines the phenomenon of lability in Estonian. We -describe the types of lability found in our database and the distribution of verbs according to formal (derivational) and semantic verb classes, and we propose an explanation for the spread of lability in the Estonian verbal lexicon. Estonian displays a wealth of labile verbs, compared...

This article investigates variation in constructions expressing need in Estonian, based on material from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian, the 1990s Fiction Subcorpus of Written Estonian, and the Estonian Dialect Corpus. The predicates included in the study, vaja/tarvis olema 'need', form two basic constructions: one takes a nominal complement and exp...

.Käesolevas artiklis vaadeldakse nimetavas käändes pronoomeni isekasutamist internetifoorumites, kus on märkimisväärselt palju näiteid isekasutustest ilma lähtevormita, s.t ilma nimi- või asesõnata, millele ise viitab. Artikli põhiküsimuseks on, kas ise-t kasutataksegi süstemaatiliselt isikulise pronoomeni asemel lause subjektina.Täpsemalt uurime,...

This paper examines linguistic politeness among Estonians and Russians in Estonia. We raise the question of how groups living in different conditions of societal bilingualism acknowledge different politeness norms and hence exhibit different politeness behavior. Our study focuses especially on the choice of the formal or informal second person pron...

This paper examines linguistic politeness in a bilingual society, focusing on forms of address among Estonian speakers and Russian speakers in Estonia. We ask in what ways groups living in different conditions of societal bilingualism acknowledge different norms of politeness and hence exhibit different politeness behavior. Our study focuses especi...

levaade. Artikli eesmärgiks on võrrelda Eestis elavate eestlaste ja venelaste suhtluskäitumist. Materjal põhineb sotsiolingvistilistel üliõpilaste küsitlustel. Eelkõige keskendutakse sina/teie valikule, kuid vaadeldakse ka muid suhtluse aspekte, näiteks suhtluskäitumise erinevuste teadvustamist ja kolmanda isiku nimetamisvormi valikut. Võtmesõnad:...

This paper presents arguments for recognizing a middle voice in Estonian. The claim that the semantics of middle-marked verbs differs in a substantial way from the semantics of other intransitive constructions leads to the examination of the discourse pragmatics of these constructions, and the relationship between discourse patterns and their valen...

This paper examines a derivational verbal affix in Estonian, traditionally called a marker of detransitivisation or reflexivisation. The paper argues that this affix is a middle marker, and that Estonian middle semantics generally fits into the domain of the middle voice as described in Kemmer (1993). The account using the middle has greater explan...

It is commonly assumed that there exists a correlation between the salience/accessibility of a referent and the expressions used to refer to it, such that the most reduced referring expressions (e.g. pronouns) are used for the most accessible referents, and fuller expressions (e.g. full NPs) for less accessible referents (e.g. Ariel 1990, Gundel et...