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Tiit-Rein Viitso. The So-Called Defective Adjective and Its Backgound |
2007, nr. 11 |
Recent grammars of Estonian postulate a set
of defective adjectives which do not agree with the head in case
and number when used as attributes. It is demonstrated in this
paper that among the four types of defective adjectives (i) the
type characterized by grammars as resembling a genitive form does
actually include genitive forms of proper names written with a
small initial letter after the orthographical reform of 1920;
(ii) the type characterized as including compounds ending in
a word resembling a partitive form represent phrases with a head
noun in the partitive case and postpositional phrases with
postpositions
ohtu and võitu; (iii) a small heterogeneous
word type that can be characterized as compounds consisting of
determinative pronouns eri and ise, value phrases
with the postposition väärt, and words functioning
as appositional titles (va, kulla).
Keywords: Estonian, parts of speech,
adjective, attribute, co-ordination.
Tiit-Rein Viitso (b. 1938), PhD, University
of Tartu, Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, Department
of Finno-Ugrian Studies, extraordinary senior researcher
tiit-rein.viitso[at]ut.ee
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