DEMONSTRATIVE DOUBLING IN SPOKEN ESTONIAN
Heete Sahkai · Trames Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences · 2003
In spoken Estonian virtually every argument and adjunct phrase in a sentence may in principle be preceded by the corresponding demonstrative.These demonstrativelexical 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.