Abstract
This article appeared in a special issue of Finno-Ugric Languages and Linguistics that was dedicated to Estonian. The article did not appear online until 2019, but the journal listed the publication date as 2018. I contacted the journal to clarify, but they haven't responded yet. For this submission, I went with 2018.
Highlights
In Estonian, some objects of verbs show an alternation in case-marking that seems to be conditioned by morphological number
If we maintain that all morphological genitive are identical in Estonian, it becomes much less clear how we could account for the case-marking patterns of Estonian pseudopartitives
I showed that Estonian pseudopartitives have a unique accusative form: a genitive N1 with a partitive N2
Summary
In Estonian, some objects of verbs show an alternation in case-marking that seems to be conditioned by morphological number. The alternative viewpoint, which has been the standard view in Estonian linguistics (e.g., it is represented in the normative standard grammars by Erelt et al 1993, 2000 and in the recent descriptive work on Estonian syntax (Erelt & Metslang 2017)) since at least Saareste (1926), is that there is no accusative case in Estonian, and these objects are assigned genitive case when singular and nominative case when plural This view is assumed or explicitly argued for by Miljan (2008), Miljan & Cann (2013), and Nemvalts (1996). As both of the arguments turn on the behavior of elements marked with genitive case in Estonian, I begin with a brief discussion of contexts utilizing genitive case in Estonian
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