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Valency Reduction in Estonian

Theories of voice based on a model of passivisation such as that exhibited by English tend to characterise valency modification as primarily a syntactic phenomenon which preserves propositional content, involving the mapping of underlying semantic roles to non-canonical syntactic argument positions. This dissertation finds such an approach insufficient to account for the observed phenomena in the more complex domain of voice in Estonian. The thesis provides a description of voice in Estonian, through an in-depth study of four valencyreducing constructions: the impersonal, personal passive, generic apersonal, and anticausative. These all involve semantic and lexical-level changes to the argument structure of a predicate. In order to arrive at a satisfactory theoretical account of voice in Estonian, the analysis must consider semantic and pragmatic information alongside the realignment of syntactic rules linking argument places with grammatical functions. The status of verbal arguments undergoing demotion in valency-changing operations is shown to be crucial to the interpretations that the various constructions give rise to. The thesis establishes a hierarchy of implicit arguments as a key element of these differences in interpretation. The impersonal argument, although non-overt, is shown to be psychologically and linguistically salient, being present for both semantic interpretation and such syntactic purposes as anaphoric reference and control. The impersonal actor is argued to be only slightly demoted, the more important property assigned to the actor argument of impersonals being that of non-specificity. Following the impersonal on the proposed Demotion Hierarchy is the personal passive, with a true demoted agent, which can, however, be re-established through an agentive adverbial, and which forms part of the interpretation of the passive construction. Generic apersonal constructions have a less accessible actor referent, whose interpretation crucially