EESTI VANEMA KIRJAKEELE VA(T)-KONSTRUKTSIOONID
vat-constructions in Old Written Estonian

Summary/Abstract: The vat-form, which in contemporary Estonian modifies the predicate verb as the complement, resembles at the same time both the infinitive and the participle. It is similar to the infinitive in that the vat-construction is an argument that behaves as a complement with regard to the main clause and because there is no syntactic relation between the notional subject and the form. It resembles the participle in that the vat-construction typically modifies verbs of perception, and it historically originated from the participle. The typological nature of the form is not fully clear. It seems that in the typology of non-finite forms, the contemporary vat-form could be regarded closer to the infinitives. However, its historical development is remarkably different from that of a typical infinitival form, which is reflected synchronically in important distinctions in the semantics and usage contexts of the vat-infinitive. The article focuses on a number of aspects in the development of the vat-infinitive in the written language of the 17th–19th centuries. The texts that were selected for the study reveal changes in the syntactic use of the vat-form in the course of time and the history of its phonetic development. The article claims that the contemporary vat-form has had from the very beginning a clearly southern Estonian background. In northern standard Estonian the vad-form prevailed until the mid-19th century, which in turn had replaced the previous va-form in northern standard Estonian at the beginning of the 18th century. Northern Estonian printed texts of the first half of the 17th century show number agreement in the v-marked form. It shows that at least when analysing the standard language of this period, one cannot regard the vat-form as an infinitival form from the perspective of typology and the development from the participle-like features towards greater resemblance to the infinitive can be partly observed in the standard language. A feature that makes the contemporary vat-form different from the prototypical infinitive is the semantics of the extension verbs. Typically, the vat-infinitive acts as an extension of predicates denoting perception, speech acts, propositional attitude, and knowledge. During the previous centuries of the history of standard Estonian, the vat-form extended rather similar predicates.

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