Corpus Evidence for Syntactic Change in Estonian Infinitive Constructions

Abstract

In present-day Estonian, the verb keelama ‘to forbid’ occurs with four types of infinitive constructions: [adessive / partitive] + [MAST-form / DA-infinitive] (mees keelab sõbral / sõpra tulemast / tulla «man forbids friend from coming / to come» ‘the man forbids a friend from coming / to come’). On the basis of usage data drawn from two corpora, one consisting of present-day Estonian texts and the other of early 20th century texts, the author points out that (1) at the turn of the 1910s and 1920s, the infinitival MAST-form, which nowadays occurs with the adessive as well as the partitive, did not occur with the adessive at all, and was used exclusively with the partitive; and that (2) the DA-infinitive was used with the partitive considerably more frequently than with the adessive in the early years of the 20th century, but the picture is the other way round in the Estonian texts of the late 1990s, where the DA-infinitive occurs with the adessive almost 9 times more frequently than with the partitive. These two facts can be explained as a result of a syntactic change which the Estonian standard language underwent during the course of the 20th century: the adessive case (e.g. sõbral) gradually gained ground in the infinitive constructions at the expense of the partitive case (e.g. sõpra). The relatively late origin (1920s or later) of the infinitive construction with the adessive and the MAST-form (e.g. keelab sõbral tulemast) fits perfectly into this scenario.