Affiliation:
1. University of Turku
2. Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary
Abstract
Abstract
The article compares the distributional differences in the use of the partitive object cases in Estonian and
Finnish via multifactorial modeling in contrastive research using the European Parliament parallel text corpus. Based on previous
contrastive research on Finnic, we expected the principles of object case marking to be similar for Estonian and Finnish
(confirmed), and the partitive objects to be more numerous in Estonian than in Finnish (not confirmed, as countable objects with
scalar verbs proved less likely to be partitive in Estonian). We hypothesized that multifactorial modeling in contrastive research
design could help identify the causes for variation and unfold subtle differences between related language systems. Since
preferences related to grammatical voice and constituent order revealed subtle differences between the systems, this hypothesis
was confirmed.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
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