TRAMES, 2007, 11(61/56), 3, 299–323

 

Indirectal in literary Estonian

(full text in pdf format)

 Maria-Maren Sepper

 Institute of the Estonian Language

 Abstract. The article aims to establish the category and means of expression of the indirectal based on the analysis of two sublanguages of contemporary literary Estonian and the relationship between the Estonian indirectal and the linguistic-typological evidentiality category. In the article, the indirectal is defined as a functional-semantic category and an overview is given of the indirectal means of expression and their dynamics in contemporary Estonian. The empirical material of the article is corpus-based. The usage analysis of linguistic means shows how the dynamics of use considerably transforms language as a text corpus although the means themselves may remain unchanged. No previous study has approached the means of expressing indirectality from a unified theoretical basis considering both semantics and function. Previous treatments have focused on formal aspects.

 

Keywords: indirectal, reported evidentiality, syntax-morphology interaction, verb categories, diachronic linguistics, corpus study

 

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