Author confidence and claim credibility: How does hedging influence reader perception? Hedges are linguistic devices that allow the author of a text to express uncertainty about a given claim and leave room for reader interpretation. Although hedges in Estonian have been studied using corpus data, little attention has been paid to how readers perceive these linguistic devices. The aim of this study is to find out whether and how different hedges influence the perception of the author’s confidence and the credibility of their claims. To investigate this, I conducted an experiment in which student readers were asked to evaluate the author’s confidence and the credibility of claims in sentences containing hedges. The study focuses on the following verbs and constructions: oletan ‘I suppose’, võib oletada ‘may suppose’, võib öelda ‘may say’, võibki oletada ‘it might indeed be supposed’, võibki öelda ‘it might indeed be said’, oletaksin ‘I would suppose’, ütleksin ‘I would say’, võiks oletada ‘might suppose’, võiks öelda ‘might say’. The participants (n = 45), students from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Tartu, were asked to evaluate statements containing hedges in terms of the author’s confidence and the credibility of the claim and to rank the statements based on perceived confidence. The results showed that statements using the conditional mood (võiks oletada, võiks öelda) were considered significantly more uncertain than others. Significant differences in confidence ratings were also found between other types of hedges. However, no clear differences emerged in credibility ratings. A comparison of ratings of author confidence and claim credibility showed that high confidence does not guarantee high credibility: significant differences between these two ratings were found for unhedged claims and for claims containing võib öelda. The ranking tasks confirmed the results of the evaluation tasks, showing that statements containing the conditional mood (võiks oletada, võiks öelda, oletaksin, ütleksin) were perceived as the least confident.
Unnecessary or meaningful –lt derivative? A comparison of the adverbs koheselt and kohe expressing immediacy This article presents a comparative analysis of the Estonian adverbs koheselt and kohe, bothexpressing immediacy, with particular attention to the long-standing prescriptive rejection of koheselt due to its perceived redundancy. Since the 1960 edition of the Dictionary of Standard Estonian, koheselt has been stigmatized without contextual consideration. Drawing on a usage-based corpus analysis, we show that koheselt gained prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, especially in Soviet-era bureaucratic and directive texts, a development that likely contributed to its subsequent stigmatization. Although its use declined following the prescriptive recommendation issued in the 1960 normative dictionary, it has gradually regained ground and now appears across a wide range of genres. The data indicates that koheselt often marks temporal immediacy more precisely than kohe and may also function as a manner adverb. Contrary to earlier claims, koheselt is not inherently unsuitable in neutral contexts. We argue that its markedness serves a communicative function and that “redundancy” can, in fact, enhance clarity and meaning in written Estonian.
Knowledge and the construction of meaning in Estonian forest poetry: An environmental scientist’s perspective Estonia is a forested country, and trees and forests are depicted in Estonian poetry in diverse ways. From a neo-cognitivist perspective, this study examines two forms of knowledge with the broader aim of understanding how knowledge about human–nature relations is created, shaped, and transmitted. The material comprises 235 poetic texts by 71 authors, recently compiled in an anthology of Estonian forest poetry (Kareva 2024). I address two main questions: (1) What scientific (propositional) knowledge of nature is reflected in forest poetry, and how is it represented? (2) What recurring experiences or imaginaries, understood as forms of non-propositional knowledge, might be addressed scientifically but have so far remained external to it (the “object of experience” concept)? My results support the view that knowledge circulates bidirectionally between science and art. The texts consistently reflect an ecological understanding of the forest as a biodiverse and temporally dynamic ecosystem. While conveying experiential nuance, forest poetry strongly generalizes natural objects, places, and time, focusing on the present and past (the latter contrasts with the futures-oriented focus of environmental research). Aspects of landscape ecology are notably absent: poetically, the Estonian forest appears continuous and vast, and when damaged, it tends to vanish altogether. Estonian poetry operates with an estimated maximum of 200 native taxon names, representing approximately 1% of actual biodiversity. A poetic “optimization” is evident: less familiar taxa are represented more generically than better known ones, such as vascular plants, mammals, and birds. Of the eight proposed objects of experience, forest silence, intrinsic value of nature, and rewilding are well represented. Trees are accorded special (often individual and sacred) status, implying a cultural basis for possible subject rights of the forest. Experiences such as curiosity, discovery, and place-specificity are less prominent. Thus, the primary mental value of the forest is recreational and aesthetic: it restores opportunities to experience a space where the lyrical self encounters nonhuman others.
Under and Ivask: Correspondence as a domestic drama Since the 1990s, more texts not originally intended for public circulation or readership have been published in Estonia than ever before: correspondence, diaries, personal notes on one’s own life and that of friends and family members, private and official documents, and other such materials. This is an ongoing reaction to Soviet-era cultural policy, which discouraged the publication of such writings. One of the most substantial corpora of life writing, amounting to nearly 1,200 printed pages, appeared in 2025 under the title Princess and the Troubadours: The Correspondence of Ivar and Astrid Ivask with Marie Under and Artur Adson, 1957–1979. Its main interlocutors are two writers who had been living in political exile since 1944: the grand old lady of Estonian poetry, Marie Under (1883–1980), in Stockholm, and the critic and poet Ivar Ivask (1927–1992), who worked as a professor in the United States. Between 1967 and 1992, Ivask edited the literary journal Books Abroad at the University of Oklahoma, later renamed World Literature Today. The journal became arguably the most internationally wide-ranging literary periodical in the world, with each issue reviewing up to 300 new books published in a total of 72 languages. Ivask himself emerged as one of the most influential literary mediators of his time, and even the Swedish Academy took note of his preferences when considering candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The cultural-historical foreground of the Under–Ivask correspondence consists of rich discussions of modern world literature. Ivask introduces the elderly poet to his favourites in Spanish (Jorge Guillén), Austrian (Heimito von Doderer), Russian (Boris Pasternak), and Greek (Odysseas Elytis) literature. An engaging dialogue develops that, despite occasional differences in taste, never escalates into conflict. The background of the correspondence, however, is charged with strong emotion. A cosmopolitan thirty-year-old intellectual of Latvian-Estonian descent and a seventy-five-year-old national poet challenge one another with new poetic tasks. Ivask encourages Under to translate Latvian, Lithuanian, and Russian poetry into Estonian (Aleksandrs Čaks, Henrikas Radauskas, and Pasternak), as well as the Latvian poems of his wife Astrid and his own poems written in German. Under, in turn, urges Ivask to write poetry in Estonian – a pursuit in which he ultimately discovers his primary vocation. This happy “working marriage” lasts precisely until Ivask comments on Under’s own poetry. Emboldened by friendship, he interprets one of her poetic lines in a way that differs from the author’s intention and describes one of her Estonian translations of a line by Charles Baudelaire as “rustically plump”, calling it foreign to the spirit of the original. This proves enough to ruin the creative relationship between the two poets. Under, who saw herself as distinctly urban, is especially sensitive to Ivask identifying “rustic” or “peasant-like” qualities in her poetry. For Under’s generation, in which the cultural divide between town and countryside remained pronounced, such qualities still carried connotations of low culture in everyday discourse.
The Americanized Estonian and its humorous representations Appearing across a range of cultural forms, from drama and literature to media and social media representations, the humorous archetype of the Americanized Estonian is rather elusive to pinpoint, but nevertheless exhibits a set of discernible characteristics. In this paper, I trace the lineage of the archetype from its appearance in the filmic and dramatic works of the post-Second World War Estonian diaspora in America to comedic characters and satirical media representations that emerged after the restoration of Estonian independence. Through the lens of superiority and incongruity theories and satire, I examine the contexts in which representations of the Americanized Estonian appear and are employed. While the archetype may reflect concerns over the Anglicization of the Estonian language and the influence of American culture and individualistic mindset, its humorous function is largely evoked through the incongruity of embodying features of both the Estonian “self” and the cultural “other”. The archetype also appears in representations that critique perceived (foreign) power structures, especially when this can be associated with identifiable public figures.
