Abstract
Estonian has features characteristic to both agglutinative and inflectional languages. The paper outlines in more detail the standing of different morphological subsystems on the inflective – agglutinative – analytic scale and characterises the strategies Estonian uses to express the values for some core grammatical categories. It is concluded that Estonian verbal morphology is more agglutinative than nominal and adjectival morphology. The somewhat weaker grammaticalisation of verbal morphology indicates that Estonian is not action oriented, but rather object-oriented. The well grammaticalised moods, particularly the ones expressing evidentiality and a rather weakly grammaticalised tense and missing aspect further characterises Estonian verbal morphology as conversationally rather than temporarily organised.
© by Akademie Verlag, Berlin, Germany
