Estonian word order and the syntax-prosody relation

What is it about?

In so called verb second (V2) languages, whatever you begin the sentence with, a verb comes next. All Germanic languages except English follow this rule. Estonian is unique among its Uralic relatives in showing the V2 pattern, even diverging from its sister language Finnish, clearly due to long contact with German. While German V2 is almost exceptionless, Estonian allows certain exceptions that depend on prosody — the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. The study shows that although Estonian borrowed the V2 word order from German, the syntax/grammar of Estonian is still basically the same as in its sister language Finnish, but Estonian has a prosodic rule which regulates the word order so that it looks like a V2 language. The V2 pattern in Estonian is therefore not purely syntactic as in Germanic, but arises through a prosodic rule that interacts with sentence structure.

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Photo by Hana Oliver on Unsplash

Photo by Hana Oliver on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The kind of interplay of prosody and syntax seen in Estonian may not be unique, but has not been observed and studied in many other languages. The Estonian V2 provides valuable evidence for how prosody interacts with rules of syntax, and how language contact can reshape word order without changing the syntax.