Konstruktsioonipõhise keelekirjelduse võimalustest adessiivse viisi- ja põhjusmääruse näitel
Construction-Based Description of Adessive Adverbials of Manner and Reason

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the paper is to illustrate the advantages of a construction-based approach to linguistic description, using as an example a class of exceptional but productively formed adverbial expressions in Estonian. The expressions consist of a deverbal action noun in the adessive case form, and a genitive NP realising the agent argument of the noun. The expressions exhibit a number of properties that cannot be accounted for by interaction between the lexical properties of the head and general grammatical principles. Those properties include idiosyncratic constituent structure and argument linking, as well as complex non-compositional semantics. The paper attempts to show how a construction-based account of the expressions permits to represent and motivate their exceptional and idiomatic properties, and to explain their partial productivity. The positing of a separate construction which licenses the expressions permits to describe their exceptional syntactic properties on the appropriate level of generalisation, and to associate these with the semantic properties that cannot be derived compositionally. Inheritance links, on the other hand, permit to represent the similarities between the nominal adverbial expressions under examination and certain infinitive expressions – a generalisation that would be impossible in head-driven approaches but permits to explain most of the unexpected properties of the expressions.

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