Kokkuvõttes eri sõnaliikide vahel
Kokkuvõttes ‘in Summary’ Between Different Parts of Speech

Summary/Abstract: There is an expression in Estonian which, written separately (kokku võttes) or together (kokkuvõttes), can cover four different parts of speech. The -des form of the phrasal verb, which expresses several different types of summarizing actions (e.g. eelnevat kokku võttes ‘to summarize the foregoing’), and the inessive form kokkuvõttes of the noun kokkuvõte ‘summary (text)’ (lühikeses kokkuvõttes ‘in a short summary’) are paradigmatic forms of full words represented in dictionaries. In addition to these, however, there is also a postpositional usage (kolme etapi kokkuvõttes ‘with the three stages taken all together’) and an adverbial usage (kokkuvõttes võis rahule jääda ‘in summary, one could be satisfied’). These latter two usages have not been listed in dictionaries. This article examines the usage of kokkuvõttes/kokku võttes in different parts of speech, using corpus data to identify the semantic and morphosyntactic features that determine part of speech and the boundary areas between usages corresponding to different parts of speech. These are regarded as possible historical bridging contexts, where the postposition and adverb have developed on the basis of the noun and/or the verb. The analysis of such borderline cases is based on semantics. As the expressions examined all originate from the phrasal verb kokku võtma ‘to summarize’, the usages corresponding to different parts of speech have a shared conceptual foundation and basis of comparison: an event of summarizing. In explaining the relationships between different parts of speech, the four components of this event are distinguished: 1) the act of summarizing, 2) the logical subject, 3) the logical object ja 4) the result of the summarizing activity. The postposition kokkuvõttes can be analyzed as a grammaticalized noun form: it no longer connotes a text as the original noun form does, but its grammatical function is still based on the meaning of that noun form. The adverb kokkuvõttes, which has a broader scope of usage, has functional similarities with the - des construction and the postpositional construction, and, judging from analogous examples of adverbialized nouns, it is possible that this form has indeed derived from the noun. However, the most likely development path for the adverbial is based on the retreat of the summarizing action expressed in the -des construction and its argument structure from the level of sentence meaning to the level of text/ discourse. This explanation is supported by the existence of the graduated transition zone which joins the -des construction and the adverb even today.

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