A corpus study of grammatical case forms in written and spoken estonian: frequency, distribution and grammatical role

In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study investigating the distribution of the three grammatical cases in Estonian (nominative, genitive, partitive) and the factors affecting the interpretation of syntactic role for nouns marked in these cases. Unlike previous studies, which have focussed on the properties of grammatical relations, we take the perspective of morphological case, and investigate the relative frequency of each case in both written and spoken corpora, according to the encoded grammatical roles, referential properties (animacy, number, countability) and syntactic context (word order, transitivity), as well as probing the differences according to register. We find that each case is prototypically, but not reliably, associated with a particular grammatical role, and that a cluster of features are available to assist speakers in identifying the function of a case-marked noun.