Same yet different: Distributional differences in the use of partitive objects in Estonian and Finnish




Ivaska Ilmari, Tamm Anne

PublisherJohn Benjamins

2024

Linguistic Variation

2211-6842

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1075/lv.23042.iva(external)

https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.23042.iva(external)



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.



Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 20:01