Partitive Morphosemantics across Estonian Grammatical Categories, and Case Variation with Equi and Raising

This article discusses two related case marking phenomena in Estonian. The first issue is representing partitive morphosemantics as it is expressed in the language specific aspectual, epistemic modal and evidential grammatical categories. A DRT based sketch of propositional attitudes and speaker-hearer relationships explicates several semantic links between the categories. The second case marking issue concerns the nature of empty categories and the distinction of raising and equi with perception verbs. Raising but not equi is the syntactic environment for variation and non-partitive case marking on the subject argument of the predicate that is embedded under mental epistemic verbs. The non-partitive case is an instance of a default accusative on the embedded subject under atelic matrix verbs in raising constructions.