Kõnelejale ja kuulajale viitamise vältimise strateegiaid eesti keeles
Strategies of avoiding explicit reference to the speaker and the addressee in Estonian

Summary/Abstract: Estonian has many linguistic means of avoiding explicit reference to the speaker and the listener (the 1st and the 2nd person). The paper examines the means of avoidance used in Internet forums and the Corpus of Spoken Estonian. The studied means of avoidance include 1) pronoun ellipsis with regard to conditional and negative predicates (especially if the verbal personal endings are missing), and 2) impersonal constructions. The impersonal constructions are usually defined as constructions where the canonical nominative subject is missing or the Agent is defocused (Siewieska 2008). Here both criteria were used, and an additional criterion was posed as avoiding explicit reference to a person in any argument position.

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