Language Change Mirroring Social Change: Constructions with saama ’get’ and Non-Finite Verb Forms in Different Periods and Registers of Written ­Estonian
Language Change Mirroring Social Change: Constructions with saama ’get’ and Non-Finite Verb Forms in Different Periods and Registers of Written ­Estonian

Summary/Abstract: The Estonian verb saama ’get; become’, together with different non-finite verb forms, is used to form impersonal, passive, resultative, modal, and future constructions. The topic of the study is the variation in usage of saama constructions in written Estonian and sociolinguistic factors explaining the changes in frequency of different saama constructions. The data come from the corpora of the University of Tartu and represent different time periods, registers, and text types from 17th—18th century religious texts to modern-day print media and fiction, computer-mediated comments and instant messaging dialogues. The results show that there are different motivations for the changes in usage of different saama constructions: communicative needs of the language community and/or the particular text type; sociocultural factors, language planning, and attitudes toward particular constructions.

• Details
• Contents