Estonian grammar

Estonian grammar is the grammar of the Estonian language.

Grammatical processes

Consonant gradation

Estonian consonant gradation is a grammatical process that affects obstruent consonants at the end of the stressed syllable of a word. Gradation causes consonants in a word to alternate between two ''grades'', termed "strong" and "weak", depending on the grammar. Some grammatical forms trigger the weak grade, while others retain the strong grade. It is not predictable which form will have which grade; this must simply be memorised. Not all words show gradation. In particular, words with stems of three or more syllables generally do not gradate, nor do words with stems of one syllable.

Gradation correlates with the appearance of extra length on a syllable. When a syllable is long, the strong grade will always be accompanied by extra length. The weak grade may or may not have extra length, depending on other factors. These are mentioned at Estonian phonology – Suprasegmental length. Some words show gradation only through the presence or absence of extra length, and the consonants themselves do not change. In this article, extra length is shown with a backtick ` before the vowel of the syllable.

The gradation patterns of geminate (long) consonants are relatively simple:
* Standing alone after a short vowel, the strong grade appears as a double voiceless consonant, while a single voiceless consonant appears in the weak grade.
* After a long vowel, or in a consonant cluster, the strong grade appears with a single voiceless consonant, while a voiced consonant appears in the weak grade.
* Long ''ss'' only gradates when it appears at the end of a cluster, with ''s'' appearing in the weak grade.

Patterns for single plosives are more varied and unpredictable. The weak grade may involve disappearance of the consonant altogether, with further consequences for vowels and extra length.

There are also four special assimilative patterns:

When a consonant is reduced to zero in the weak grade, this may cause the vowels of the two adjacent syllables to come together. These vowels undergo several changes:
* If the first vowel is long, it is shortened. Examples: : , : .
* If either vowel is ''i'', ''u'' or ''ü'', it is lowered to ''e'', ''o'' or ''ö'' respectively. Examples: : , : , : .
* If the first vowel is a diphthong ending in ''e'', the ''e'' becomes ''j''. Examples: : , : .
* If the first vowel is a diphthong ending in ''u'', the ''u'' becomes ''v''. Examples: : .
* If the first vowel is a diphthong ending in any other sound, the second vowel is removed if it is identical. Examples: : , : .

Assibilation

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.

Singular nominative, singular genitive and singular partitive are not predictable and have to be taken from the vocabulary ( gradation may also apply).

Singular genitive always ends in vowel. When formed from a stem that ends in consonant, it can take the following endings: ''-a, -e, -i, -o, -u''.

Singular partitive can take the following endings: ''-d, -t, -a, -e, -i, -u''.

Plural partitive is formed from either singular genitive or singular partitive and can take the following endings (some words have two forms):
* ''-id'': one-syllable words with long vowels ''aa, ee, õõ, uu, öö, ää'', two-syllable words with long vowels or endings ''-em, -en, -el, -er, -ar, -ur, -e, -ne, -s'' or singular genitive with one or three syllables, three-syllable words with endings ''-ne, -s'',
* ''-sid'': one-syllable words with long vowels ''ii, üü'' or a diphthong, two-syllable words with short vowels, three-syllable words with endings ''-um, -on, -er, -ar, -är, -ov, -nna'',
* ''-e'': words with singular partitive endings ''-i, -u, -j'', or singular partitive ending ''-a'' with the preceding syllable containing ''u'',
* ''-i'': words with singular partitive ending ''-e'', or singular partitive ending on consonant with singular genitive ending ''-e'', or singular partitive ending ''-a'' with the preceding syllable containing vowels ''e, o, ä, ö, ü'' or a diphthong with one of these vowels as the first sound with the exception of ''ei, äi'',
* ''-u'': words with singular partitive ending ''-a'' with the preceding syllable containing vowels ''a, i, õ'' or diphthongs ''ei, äi''.

Singular illative has a short form in some words. It can take the following endings: ''-de'', ''-he'', ''-hu'', ''-a'', ''-e'', ''-i'', ''-u''. In case it takes the vowel ending, this vowel is the same as the ending vowel of the singular genitive form of the given word, but the vowel (if it is already long or a diphthong) or its preceding consonant (if the vowel is short and the consonant either short or long) is lengthened to the third degree and thus becomes overlong. If illative ends with ''-sesse'', then the short form is ''-sse''.

Plural illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative have a short form in some words. If the plural partitive ends with ''-id'', then the short plural stem is this form without ''-d'' (instead of plural genitive with ''-de-''); if it ends with a vowel, then the short plural stem is this form; if it ends with ''-sid'', then the short plural cannot be formed.

Emphasis: noun + ''-gi'' (after a final voiced consonant or vowel) / ''-ki'' (after a final voiceless consonant).

New nouns can be derived from existing nouns, adjectives and verbs using suffixes like ''-ja'' (agent, from ''-ma'' infinitive), ''-mine'' (gerund, from ''-ma'' infinitive), ''-la, -nna, -tar, -ur, -stik, -ndik, -nik, -ik, -k, -ng, -lane, -line, -kene, -ke, -e, -ndus, -dus, -us, -is, -kond, -nd, -istu, -u''.

Pronouns

* 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:

: ' (active present participle, from ' infinitive),
: ' (active perfect participle, from ' infinitive),
: ' (passive present participle, from ' participle),
: ' (passive perfect participle), and '.

Antonym can be formed by prepending ' or ' to an adjective. ' is considered to be the only derivational prefix in Estonian; as ' can also occur as a separate word, ' + adjective can be regarded as a compound rather than derivative. Alternatively, for an adjective formed from a noun or a verb, an antonym can often be constructed using the suffix ' or '.

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.

Postpositions
* with the genitive case and declinable (illative/allative – inessive/adessive – elative/ablative): ' (under), ' (in front of), ' (at), ' (after), ' (in the middle), ' (above), ' (beside), ' (in the hand of), ' (near), ' (on), ' (in), ' (behind), ' (between), ' (by)
* with the genitive case and non-declinable: ' (for), ' (according to), ' (via), ' (about), ' (on account of), ' (vis-à-vis), ' (against), ' (over), ' (around)
* with the partitive case: ' (along)
* with the elative case: ' (down), ' (through), ' (since)

Prepositions
* with the genitive case: ' (through), ' (besides), ' (over), ' (around)
* with the partitive case: ' (down), ' (before), ' (amid), ' (along), ' (alongside), ' (after), ' (against)
* with the terminative case: ' (until)
* with the abessive case: ' (without)
* with the comitative case: ' (with)

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 an agglutinative language, the word order is quite free and non-neutral word order can be used to stress some parts of the sentence or in poetic texts, as in Finnish grammar. For example, consider the sentence ' which means ‘(a/the) man killed (a/the) bear’ and uses the neutral SVO word order. The sentence can be rephrased using OVS word order as '—a normal Estonian sentence that could be more precisely translated as ‘it was (a/the) man who killed the bear’, i. e., the speaker emphasizes that the killer was a man, probably assuming the listener knows that a bear was killed. The other four word orders (', ', ', ') are also possible in certain contexts, especially if more words are added to the three-word sentences. The following data (4–24, 50–72) are sourced from (Tauli, 1983) and (Erelt, 2009) at the University of Tartu.

Sometimes the forms of verbs, nouns and adjectives in the sentence are not enough to determine the subject and object, e. g. ' (‘the men killed the bears’) or ' (‘father killed the bear’)—in the first sentence because in plural, the nominative case is used in Estonian both for subject and telic object, and in the second sentence because in singular, the nominative, genitive and partitive forms of the word ' are the same, as well as those of the word ' (unlike the word ' which has different forms: sg. nom. ', sg. gen. ', sg. part. '). In such sentences, word order is the only thing that distinguishes the subject and the object: the listener presumes that the former noun (', ') is the subject and the latter (', ') is the object. In such situations, the speaker cannot interchange the subject and the object for emphasis (unless it is obvious from the context which noun is the subject).

Basic 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 or indirect object. A direct object can be in the partitive (partial object) (23), or in the genitive or nominative (total object) (24).
In the affirmative clause the total object refers to definite quantity and the clause expresses a perfective activity. If at least one of the conditions is not met, the partitive is used, for example, clause (23) denotes an imperfective activity; the clause ' ‘He drank some water and then started to eat’ denotes a perfective activity but an indefinite quantity. In the negative clause only the partial object can be used, e.g. ' ‘The father didn’t take the child to school’. Some verbs, such as the verbs of cognition, only take the partial object also in the affirmative, e.g. ' ‘Father loves children’. The total object in Estonian does not express the perfective aspect as strongly as in the Finnish language, and for this reason perfective adverbs are often used along with it.
The total object is predominantly in the genitive. The nominative is used if the object is in the plural as in (24) or if there is (normally) no subject in the clause, and the object happens to be the most central argument in the clause, i.e. if the verb is in the imperative mood, e.g. ‘Take the child to school!’, impersonal, e.g. ‘The child is taken to school’, or the da-infinitive (except cases where the da-infinitive acts also as the object), e.g. ' ‘The father’s task was to take the child to school’
Measure adverbials behave similarly to the object in that they occur in the nominative/genitive or the partitive roughly under similar circumstances, e.g. ' om' en' ‘He skied five kilometres / one kilometre’ – ' art' ‘He didn’t ski not a single kilometre’; ' om' / en ‘I waited for half an hour / an hour’ – ' art' ‘I didn’t wait even a minute’.

Word 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. Tael

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases