ESTONIAN ACADEMY
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eesti teaduste
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The Yearbook of the Estonian Mother Tongue Society cover
The Yearbook of the Estonian Mother Tongue Society
Impact Factor (2022): 0.3
Suuline relatiivlause viitevahendina; pp. 152–176
PDF | 10.3176/esa66.07

Author
Renate Pajusalu
Abstract

Relative clauses in spoken Estonian as referential devices

In this article, the usage of relative clauses in spoken Estonian in the overall framework of referential devices is studied. The data come from the corpus of spoken Estonian (University of Tartu), and contain relative clauses beginning with the relativizers mis ‘that (non-animate)’, kes ‘that (animate)’ and kus ‘that, where’ (in all grammatical cases). The collected data (403 relative clauses from institutional and non-institutional conversations) were analysed according to the types of head NP (including bare NPs, NPs with determiners, demonstratives, quantifiers, zero reference).
The analysis revealed that relative clauses (RC) in the data could be divided into six main types: referent-choosing RC, referent-creating RC (in specific and non-specific contexts) and referent-confirming RC could be treated as restrictive RC; referent-characterizing RC, continuative RC, and non-referential RC could be treated as appositive RC. The analysis also revealed that no type of head NP is strictly related to any type of RC.

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