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TYPOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF GRADATION IN ESTONIAN

Gradation, äs it appears in contemporary Estonian, is the result of a long historical development. During this development, changes have taken place in the factors conditioning gradation, in the System of gradation and its function in the language, the role of gradation in expressing grammatical meanings, and the morphological characteristics of the language itself. In order to comprehend the typological nature of Estonian gradation, it is necessary 1) to determine the stages of the diachronic evolution of gradation, tracing the transition from phonetically conditioned non-phonemic sound alternation to lexically and morphologically conditioned phonological alternation, used for semantic purposes; 2) to compare gradation in Estonian with gradation in closely related languages; 3) to compare Estonian gradation with comparable inflectional phenomena in other languages (e.g. Umlaut in Germanic, which has been extensively studied); and 4) to characterize the functions of gradation in contemporary Estonian. Arnold Kask offers the following characterization of the typological nature of contemporary Estonian: "As far äs morphological structure is concerned, Estonian is agglutinative-inflectionaT (NE 1978: 231; cf. ENE (Soviet Estonian Encyclopedia) 2, 1970: 23). In spite of such a characterization, the same encyclopedia contains articles devoted to the Estonian language in which gradation is treated not äs a phenomenon associated with morphology, but rather äs a feature of phonology — even though the assignment of Estonian among stem-inflectional languages has to be based primarily on gradation, which is the most obvious instance of stem inflection in contemporary Estonian. This contradiction is due to a confusion of diachronic and synchronic approaches: in describing the gradational System and its forms, gradation is assigned to a place where it belongs in the history of the Estonian language — and under certain conditions, in the more conservative grammar of the Finnish language, but in describing