Personaalpronoomenite ja pöördevormide sekundaarkasutusest eesti ja vene keeles
On the metaphorical use of personal pronouns and verb forms in Estonian and Russian

Summary/Abstract: The article is devoted to the metaphorical use of personal pronouns and their respective verb forms in Russian and Estonian. Personal pronouns is one of the first topics that is introduced to the learner of any language. In Russian and Estonian the systems of personal pronouns are quite similar, however their metaphorical use is not identical in these languages. Some metaphorical uses are regular in Russian but are not common in Estonian; it depends on the cultural and linguistic traditions of the language in question. While most cases of the metaphorical use of personal pronouns and related verb forms are nonetheless the same in Estonian and Russian, one can still point out some dissimilarities. Significant differences appear in two cases: 1) the possibility of replacing the 1st person plural form with the 3rd person singular form exists only in Estonian; 2) the use of the 3rd person plural form instead of the 1st person singular form in Russian requires a completely different grammatical choice in Estonian: a form of impersonal voice. It is curious that several cases of the metaphorical use of personal pronouns and verb forms appear in communication with young children. The list of cases of the metaphorical use of pronouns and verb forms analysed in this paper cannot be considered exhaustive, however it should demonstrate that every personal pronoun can be used metaphorically in Russian and Estonian. It is noticeable that these metaphorical uses can cause some difficulties in learning the language and also in the translation process. Therefore, it is important to keep all these differences between languages in mind when teaching or translating

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