TRAMES, 2003, 7(57/52), 2, 120–144

Demonstrative Doubling in Spoken Estonian

Heete Sahkai

Institute of the Estonian Language

Abstract. In spoken Estonian virtually every argument and adjunct phrase in a sentence may in principle be preceded by the corresponding demonstrative. These demonstrative–lexical element pairs have been assigned different syntactic analyses or have not been analysed at all. In the present article it will be argued that all these combinations are instances of the same syntactic construction, which can be interpreted as a doubling construction and which can perform various functions of grammatical, semantic and pragmatic nature. In addition, it will be suggested that this construction is part of a larger syntactic strategy characteristic of the Estonian language.

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