-des and -mata converbs in Estonian dialects
-des and -mata converbs in Estonian dialects

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the usage of two Estonian converbs (the prototypical –des converb and its negative counterpart the -mata converb) in Estonian dialects. The data is collected from the morphologically tagged texts of the University of Tartu’s corpus of Estonian dialects. Compared to written texts, converbs in spoken (dialectal) speech are infrequent; also, -mata converbs are rarer than -des converbs. -des converbs are most used in the Western, Coastal and Insular dialects, whereas the -mata converb is more frequent (although still rare) in the Tartu, Võro and Western dialects. In dialects, converbs are used in fewer functions than in Standard Estonian. The -des converb is used most often to indicate manner, but also as a temporal adverbial; the -mata converb conveys mostly the meaning of manner or means (all cases that answer the question how?). -des converbs indicating manner are less frequent in the North-Eastern and Coastal dialects, while in South Estonian dialects (Võro, Seto and Mulgi), there are more manner converbs and fewer temporal converbs. The relatively frequent usage of short adverb-like manner converbs in dialects is also the main difference from the use of converbs in Standard Estonian. However, this is probably not a characteristic of dialects, but rather of spoken language, which tends to favor the usage of shorter and more grammaticalized and lexicalized converbs. In dialects, there are both implicit and explicit subject converbs. Although explicit subject converbs are rather rare and these are used in more or less set phrases (the most used are päikese tõustes ‘when the sun is rising’ and X’i nähes ‘in the presence of X’, in the Western dialect also ‘as X remembers’), in the Coastal dialect, the verb mäletama ‘remember’ can also be used in this construction (this is not possible in Standard Estonian, where only limited transitive verbs can form an explicit subject converb construction). The implicit subject converbs in dialects are similar to the corresponding construction in Standard Estonian.

• Details
• Contents