The case of the object in Livonian

Abstract

The moribound Livonian language spoken in Latvia belongs to a subgroup of the Finno-Ugric languages often referred to as Balto-Finnic languages. In these languages, which include Finnish and Estonian, two or more morphological cases can be used to mark the direct object of a sentence. This book is the first in-depth examination of the factors conditioning this case alternation in Livonian. It is based on a large corpus of sentences taken from spoken and written language sources.