Open AccessCoding and behaviour of Estonian subjects
Author(s) -
Helena Metslang
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
eesti ja soome-ugri keeleteaduse ajakiri./eesti ja soome-ugri keeleteaduse ajakiri
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.142
H-Index - 5
eISSN - 2228-1339
pISSN - 1736-8987
DOI - 10.12697/jeful.2013.4.2.12
Subject(s) - estonian , linguistics , subject (documents) , hierarchy , computer science , degree (music) , coding (social sciences) , rule based machine translation , set (abstract data type) , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , mathematics , statistics , political science , philosophy , physics , library science , acoustics , law , programming language
This study is a construction-specific approach to subjecthood in Estonian. It has grown out of Croft’s (2001) view that due to the diversity of the syntactic roles’ distribution across constructions, there is a need for a shift in grammars to construction- specific syntactic roles. However, in order to compare different arguments, it is also necessary to employ a global cross-constructional subject category. This study treats subjecthood as a set of properties that is represented on arguments to a different degree. The study provides a comprehensive analysis of Estonian prototypical subjects and subject-like arguments (10 in total) from the viewpoint of a large number of morphosyntactic criteria (16). The study is an attempt to apply multivariate analysis on the arguments’ syntactic behaviour research. The paper claims that most Estonian subject-like arguments only show subjecthood properties to a limited degree. Supportive data is provided for the Hierarchy of Grammatical Relations Constructions.