Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Finnish and Estonian are closely related languages in the Finnic subgroup of the Uralic family. Syntactically they are similar in many respects. Both are SVO languages with verb movement, but SOV occurs as well, and sentential word order is in general quite free. They have similar systems of nominal and verbal inflections. Both have wh-movement. One striking difference, though, as regards sentential word order is that Estonian is, or appears to be, a Germanic-style V2 language, while Finnish is not. This suggests that the left periphery in Estonian is different from that in Finnish, and more like that in the Germanic V2 languages. A close examination of the left periphery in Finnish and Estonian reveals that they are, in fact, very similar, but the derivation of V2 order is different in Estonian from the derivation of Germanic V2.

The left periphery particularly in Finnish is well known (thanks to work by Maria Vilkuna, Anders Holmberg & Urpo Nikanne, Pauli Brattico, Anne Vainikka, Saara Huhmarniemi and others). It is in certain ways structured quite differently from that of its West or East European counterparts, including the more closely related Hungarian. As will be shown, the Estonian left periphery has essentially the same structure and same properties. The V2 vs. V3 contrast would be neatly accounted for if Estonian had verb movement one notch higher than Finnish, across the subject. However, there are certain exceptions to V2 in Estonian which are not accounted for under such an analysis: If the subject is a weak pronoun, or if the verb is accented, V2 need not be observed. This indicates that the V2 condition is a prosodic condition in Estonian. Historically, the V2 order in Estonian is almost certainly taken over from Baltic German. However, the German syntactic V2 condition has been integrated in the Finnic left-peripheral syntax by being reanalysed as, in part, a prosodic condition. An analysis is presented of V2 order in Estonian as an effect of marked spell-out of copies in movement chains.