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Perfectivity, telicity and Estonian verbs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2007

Anne Tamm
Anne Tamm
Affiliation:
University of Florence, Sector of Finno-Ugric Philology, Via Santa Reparata 93-95, 50129 Florence, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper discusses telicity and perfectivity in Estonian. Neither of these categories corresponds exactly to the Estonian object case alternation, which is argued to reflect predicate or clause aspectual properties and not the NP-related properties of objects. The aim of this account is to accommodate the systematic compatibility of verb classes with certain clausal aspectual object case marking patterns. The paper proposes a way of understanding the interaction between verbal and clausal aspect in terms of boundedness and formalizes it in the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). The features of verbs and case markers determine the clausal aspect from different constituents at the syntactic level of constituent structure. The information is unified at another syntactic level, functional structure.

Keywords

accusativeEstonianpartitiveperfectivitytelicity
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , December 2007 , pp. 229 - 255
Copyright
2007 Cambridge University Press

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