Gradient constraints on the use of Estonian possessive reflexives

Abstract

We report on a corpus study of the use of reflexive vs. nonreflexive possessives in Estonian sentences headed by verbs taking an allative argument. We parsed the Estonian National Corpus using UDPipe trained with the Estonian Dependency Corpus, extracted relevant data automatically, eliminated false positives and annotated the data by hand. This allowed us to document effects of grammatical functions, word order and person on the choice of a reflexive vs. nonreflexive, using generalized linear mixed models. We hypothesize that the documented effects are due to the combined effects of grammatical relations, information structure, and ambiguity avoidance.