Acceso usuarios
Tartu linn, Estonia
The primary means for expressing polar questions in Estonian are particles positioned at the beginning or the end of a sentence. We trace the development of these question particles from the seventeenth century until to the present day. In the course of time new particles emerged and older ones changed their function. Such functional shifts included, among others, the loss of negative or affirmative polarity, the loss of interrogativity, or the adoption of a focus-marking function. The oldest question particles based on negative particles are interesting because of the functional shifts which they underwent and which can be found in Old Written Estonian texts. The older Written South Estonian particle es, for example, is often cited as an example of decliticisation, and claimed to have developed in the opposite direction of usual grammaticalisation paths. As our analysis reveals, however, it has in fact followed a normal path of development after all: deriving from a compound, and changing from a sentence-initial marker of polar questions to a scope marker following the question word or phrase in content questions, the simple particle was sometimes cliticised by merging with preceding words.
