Same yet different

Distributional differences in the use of partitive objects in Estonian and Finnish

Bibliographic Data

ID4567753
AuthorsIlmari Ivaska (0000-0001-7366-7111, University of Turku, corresponding author), Anni Tamm (0000-0002-5804-0174, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary)
Year2024
Volume24
Issue2
Pages323-371
Publication date2024-11-14
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistic Variation (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2211-6834 • E-ISSN: 2211-6842
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/lv.23042.iva
OpenAlexW4391997853
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited53

The article compares the distributional differences in the use of the partitive object cases in Estonian and Finnish via multifactorial modeling in contrastive research using the European Parliament parallel text corpus. Based on previous contrastive research on Finnic, we expected the principles of object case marking to be similar for Estonian and Finnish (confirmed), and the partitive objects to be more numerous in Estonian than in Finnish (not confirmed, as countable objects with scalar verbs proved less likely to be partitive in Estonian). We hypothesized that multifactorial modeling in contrastive research design could help identify the causes for variation and unfold subtle differences between related language systems. Since preferences related to grammatical voice and constituent order revealed subtle differences between the systems, this hypothesis was confirmed

Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Geology