Ainsuse 1. isikule viitamine eesti murretes
The first person singular reference in Estonian Dialects

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the grammatical means of marking the 1st person singular in Estonian dialects: the 1st person singular verb ending and the 1st person pronoun mina~ma ’I’. Estonian dialects show variation in marking the 1st person singular in indicative affi rmative verb forms. Most Estonian dialects and Standard Estonian mark the 1st person forms by means of the explicit ending -n while this ending has been lost in southern and western dialects. As a result, the 1st person verb forms are not clearly identifi able and may be syncretic with some other verb forms. Estonian has an ambiguous agreement marker, that is, verb forms can be used with or without a personal pronoun (Siewierska 2004). The aim of this paper is to test the effect of the occurrence of the explicit 1st person ending on the pronoun ellipsis (pro-drop) phenomenon. The main hypothesis is that there is a tendency to use the pronoun more often in dialects without the explicit 1st person ending (-ø) than in dialects with -n. Varbrul-analysis of 2,138 1st person singular verb forms from 14 parish dialects was carried out. Each verb form was encoded with regard to 10 factors. Statistically the most important factors affecting the use of personal pronoun included: (1) referential distance (see Givón 1983). The pronoun was left out more often if the referential distance was 1 (= the 1st person had been mentioned in the previous clause; 53.6% of the verb forms were accompanied by the personal pronoun) than with the referential distance 3 (= previous mentioning more than 2 clauses before; 84.5% of the 1st person verb forms were accompanied by the personal pronoun). (2) structure of the text and syntactic connection type between the clauses. At the beginning of the new paragraph or thematic section, the verb form was accompanied by the personal pronoun in 73.5% of clauses. If the clause containing the 1st person verb form was subordinated to the previous clause, the personal pronoun was used more often (79.7%) than in those cases when it was coordinated with the previous clause (54.1%). (3) presence of the ending -n. Where the explicit ending -n occurred, 60.6% of the verb forms were accompanied by the personal pronoun; if not, the percentage amounted to 75.9%. (4) parish dialect. Many territorial differences appeared, but the differences between the dialects did not correlate with the presence of the ending -n. In West Estonia, the personal pronouns were more common than in East Estonia. (5) grammatical time. The verb forms in present tenses (simple present and present perfect) were more often accompanied by the personal pronoun (74.1%) than verb forms in past tenses (simple past and pluperfect; 65.3%).

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