Abstract
This paper investigates three morphosyntactic alternations in Estonian – those between the exterior locative cases allative, adessive, and ablative and the corresponding postpositions peale ‘onto’, peal ‘on’, and pealt ‘off’. It is assumed that the influence of different predictors on speakers’ choices will be relatively stable in terms of the direction of those predictors, but the strength of these will vary. For each alternation, a random sample of the two outcomes (case vs. postposition) from the Estonian National Corpus is used, resulting in a total of 3,000 data points. Using properties of the landmark phrase as independent variables in mixed-effects logistic regression models, the choice of postpositions over case-marked realizations is predicted. The models fitted to the data confirm that the direction of the eight predictors investigated is the same across the alternations, with freqRatio, lemma, and mobility making the most significant contribution to the fit of all three models. The study further shows that the two alternating pairs that have a higher global frequency in Estonian (allative ∼ peale and adessive ∼ peal) behave in a similar way with respect to the predictors under study; the third, less frequent alternation (ablative ∼ pealt), differs from the other two in terms of the number and type of predictors that make a significant contribution to the model fit.
Appendix A: Functions of the Estonian exterior cases (adapted from Erelt et al. 2007: 249–251)
| Allative | Example sentence | Postpositional alternative | English translation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direction of location | Mari pani vaasi lauale. | Mari pani vaasi laua peale. | ‘Mari put the vase on(to) the table.’ |
| Time | Koosolek viidi üle neljapäevale. | Koosolek viidi üle neljapäeva peale. | ‘The meeting has been moved to Thursday.’ |
| State | Tüdruku nägu läks naerule. | Not attested | ‘The girl started to laugh.’ |
| Addressee | Mari rääkis Jürile kõik ära. | Not attested | ‘Mari told Jüri everything.’ |
| Experiencer | Mulle meeldib siin elada. | Not attested | ‘I like living here.’ |
| Object of action | Ta lootis sõpradele. | Ta lootis sõprade peale. | ‘He counted on friends.’ |
| Object of emotion | Mihkel on sõbrale kade. | Mihkel on sõbra peale kade. | ‘Mihkel is jealous of his friend.’ |
| Without clear meaning | Järgenege mulle. | Not attested | ‘Follow me.’ |
| Adessive | Example sentence | Postpositional alternative | English translation |
|
|
|||
| Location | Vaas on laual. | Vaas on laua peal. | ‘The vase is on the table.’ |
| Time | Nad sõidavad neljapäeval maale. | Not attested | ‘They are driving to the country on Thursday.’ |
| State | Jüri vaatas meid naerul näoga. | Not attested | ‘Jüri looked at us with a laughing face.’ |
| Possessor | Maril on kaks last. | Not attested | ‘Mari has two children.’ (lit. ‘On Mary are two children.’) |
| Agent with finite verb form | See asi ununes mul kiiresti. | Not attested | ‘I quickly forgot about that thing.’ |
| Instrument | Mari mängib klaveril mõnd lugu. | Mari mängib klaveri peal mõnd lugu. | ‘Mari is playing some tunes on the piano.’ |
| Manner | Mari kuulas kikkis kõrvul. | Not attested | ‘Mari listened with her ears pricked up.’ |
| Ablative | Example sentence | Postpositional alternative | English translation |
|
|
|||
| Source of location | Mari võttis vaasi laualt. | Mari võttis vaasi laua pealt. | ‘Mari took the vase off the table.’ |
| Source | Mari kuulis seda Jürilt. | Not attested | ‘Mari heard it from Jüri.’ |
| Modifier of a noun | Elukutselt on ta insener. | Not attested | ‘He is an engineer by profession.’ |
Appendix B: Importance of predictors in the corpus models
The first column in Tables 4–6 shows the order in which the eight predictors were added to the intercept only model (the null model). The last column lists the reduction in AIC – the larger the reduction in AIC once a specific predictor is added, the more important the predictor is.
Appendix C: Predicting constructional choice
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