Eesti keele genitiivse agendifraasi süntaks
the syntax of the Estonian genitive agent Phrase

Summary/Abstract: the article proposes a construction-based account of an idiosyncratic phrase type in estonian. the phrase consists of a non-finite verb form and a genitive NP realizing its actor argument. the phrase does not conform to the general specifier-head and head-complement phrase structure patterns and it cannot be associated with a particular class of lexical items, to which the idiosyncratic combinatoric properties could be attributed. instead, the distribution of this phrase type can be described in terms of specific phrasal and clausal constructions. in other words, the phrase is a construction-specific phrase type, which does not conform to the general principles of syntax and is not a projection of the combinatoric properties of the head. in addition to exceptional syntactic properties, the phrase displays an idiosyncratic argument linking pattern, and has a fixed and syntactically exceptional focus position, which is independent of sentence accent. this means that the phrase also displays construction-specific interface relations between syntax, semantics, information structure and prosody. the phrase also constitutes a new type of evidence for constructional approaches as an idiosyncratic phrase structure has not been described on this level of generalization before. this poses a problem for UG-based constructional approaches and supports the usagebased approaches.

• Details
• Contents