Base Form and Other Forms of the Estonian Verb

Abstract

The article discusses the implicational patterns present in the Estonian verb paradigm: which paradigm slot acts as the base form, which slots act as other principal parts, and what does their dependency hierarchy look like. The argument relies on data from three different types of source: acquisition of Estonian as the first language by children; verbal inflectional classes that are reconstructed from the 17th century Tallinn variety of Estonian; and statistics from different contemporary corpora. The article arrives at a different implicational schema than that which is generally accepted in the Estonian grammar tradition. The article suggests that the base form is the bare stem (which is used as the 2nd person imperative and prohibitive, as well as the negation of present indicative), and that the other three principal parts are: the infinitive; the wordform representing simultaneously the past participle impersonal and past indicative negative impersonal; and third-person singular past indicative. The supine, which is traditionally regarded as the base form, is relegated to being dependent on the third-person singular past indicative. The article acknowledges that the proposed schema causes difficulties with the algorithm of generating paradigm slots for words that now exhibit strengthening gradation pattern, traditionally considered to be unproductive for Estonian words, and even completely missing for verbs.