ILMAÜTLEVAST EITUSEST
The Estonian abessive negation of the perfect

Summary/Abstract: The Estonian abessive shares characteristics with almost all Uralic languages, which have abessives, caritives or privatives. As many other Uralic languages, the Estonian abessive emerges in both verbal (as the -mata form) and nominal forms (as -ta). The nominal and verbal abessive forms are optionally complements of the preposition ilma ‘without’ in Estonian. The agglutinative features and rich case system of Estonian is not matched by its non-Finnic contact languages in the European area. The focus of the study is how the verbal abessive fits into the functional gaps in the verbal paradigms of newly developed and analytically expressed tenses such as the perfects. A corpus study supports the hypothesis that the -mata form is taking on more verbal properties and losing nominal properties in its developments towards a construction expressing the negation of the perfect.

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