Eesti vaatama-verbi ja selle vene ja ukraina vastete sihilisusest
On the transitivity of the verb ‘watch’/’look’ in Estonian, Russian and Ukrainian

Summary/Abstract: The article studies the transitivity of the Estonian verb vaatama ‘watch, look’ and its Russian and Ukrainian equivalents. The aim is to determine how regular the transitive and intransitive patterns of ‘watch, look’ are in Estonian and two East Slavic languages. Since in Ukrainian and Russian most verbs have an aspectual pair, both the imperfective and perfective counterparts of Estonian vaatama were examined, in order to determine which verb lexeme is used transitively potentially more often. The corpus-based study confirmed that the transitivity of the verb ‘watch, look’ can vary significantly between languages. Applying the same method, it was found that the Russian and Ukrainian equivalents of Estonian vaatama have a significantly lower degree of transitivity. However, in Ukrainian and Russian the perfective verb is used transitively somewhat more often than its imperfective counterpart. The findings of the study indicate the importance of language-specific aspectual lexical semantics in determining the degree of transitivity and could be taken into account while teaching Estonian as a second or a foreign language and compiling dictionaries for language learners.

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