Who needs it? Variation in experiencer marking in Estonian ‘need’-constructions

Abstract

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 coded ‘need’-constructions from spoken and written corpora and used non-parametric classification methods for analysis. We found high rates of oblique experiencer omission in these constructions (nearly 60% across corpora). The most important predictors of overt expression of the experiencer in our models were participant-internal modality and the presence of nominal complements, meaning that both semantic and syntactic factors are relevant. The choice between two overt cases is affected by person, complement type, and referential distance. Topical experiencer arguments do not show the subject-like tendency to be omitted more often, but they are more likely to be marked with adessive case, suggesting that adessive is more grammaticalised as a structural, non-nominative, argument-marking case than the more semantic allative case. Our findings show that oblique, semantic arguments may be frequently omitted, and both semantic and syntactic factors may affect variation in case-marking.

Syntactic variation in ‘need’-constructions in Estonian dialects

“…However, the differences between the results of the two methods may also be a sign that there is something else going on, not taken into account so far. Another study (Lindström & Vihman 2017) reveals that in the same constructions in standard Estonian, participant-internal or -external modality has a crucial role, with participant-internal modality clearly increasing the probability of overt expression of the experiencer. In the present study modality is not analysed in detail, so we cannot further elaborate upon the idea of the effect of modality type on experiencer ellipsis in dialects.…”

“…According to the dictionary of contemporary Standard Estonian, vaja is approximately 3.5 times more frequent than tarvis (see Kaalep & Muischnek 2002). In contemporary spoken Estonian the same tendency is even more visible: vaja dominates clearly over tarvis , being used in almost 90% of the occurrences of tarvis / vaja constructions (Lindström, Uiboaed, Vihman 2014, Lindström & Vihman 2017). There are no dialectal data where the distribution of tarvis and vaja are comprehensively described, but the Estonian dialect dictionary VMS (Haak et al 1989) contains information as to sub-dialects where these occurrences have been attested.…”

“…These two zero types, however, are not always clearly distinguishable, and reference resolution emerges from the context. (See also Lindström & Vihman 2017.) …”

“…The nominal complement construction (2) expresses a need for or lack of something and is less grammaticalized in this respect; it can therefore also be called a pre-modal construction. (See Lindström & Vihman 2017 for more information about the same constructions in standard Estonian.) These two basic constructions are the most common in the data.…”

With or without articles? A comparison of article-like determiners in Estonian and Finnish

“…The random forest method constructs a larger set of trees and, based on the average of all the trees, selects the important variables that best classify the data; the relative variable importance then can be calculated (Breiman 2001;Tagliamonte & Baayen 2012). These methods, also called "tree & forest" (see Janda 2013: 26), have been successfully implemented in linguistic studies as well (e.g., Tagliamonte & Baayen 2012;Baayen et al 2013;Lindström & Vihman 2017;Taremaa 2017;Priiki 2017).…”