Keywords: Estonian philology, figurative language, Lutheran hymns, Pietist hymnal, translation, old Literary Estonian
In the development of Estonian philology, two phases can be distinguished: the phase of the so-called external view, when the meta-language of philological discussions was German, and the phase of the internal view, when since the 19th century, Estonian began to be used as the meta-language for speaking and writing about the Estonian language and folklore as well as about the emerging literature. The emergence of Estonian authors’ literature and literary criticism presupposed a literary language expressive enough to describe the emotional life and trains of thought of…

Keywords: deixis, indexicality, emotional/modal deixis, deictic network, deictic plot, pragmapoetics, close reading, poetry
The article suggests, inspired from practical didactics, the use of pragmapoetic deixis analysis as an approach to enrich close reading of poetry. When applying the pragmalinguistic theory of deixis and the analytic philosophical theory of indexicals to poetic texts one will soon notice that beside the traditional spatial, temporal and personal deixis it is necessary to speak of emotional, or modal, deixis. The latter functions on the scale of positive and negative connotations, or of subjective distance, which is the mental counterpart of spatial relations. In addition, poetry…

Keywords: philology, national identity, discovery and invention, theory and technology, measurements, deduction
The academic discipline of philology may have a different content in different cultures, but obviously philology as research of language (mother tongue), folklore, and national literature is important for national identity and the self-concept of a nation, even more so for small nations. In Estonia the scope of Estonian philology took shape in connection with the national movement in the second half of the 19th century, and more clearly at the beginning of the 20th century. Since the early 1920s Estonian Philology has been a subject taught at Tartu…

Keywords: history of folkloristics, folklore theory and methodology, philology of the vernacular
It has become customary in Estonian research tradition to consider folkloristics as a philological discipline, while the scholarship has had a retrospective and archival orientation. Presupposing the existence of a primeval cultural unity, now lost, and considering folklore as part of the Finno-Ugric heritage has certainly contributed to the philological thought. However, interest in the social environment of folklore and research of its non-verbal forms already appeared before the Second World War, manifested in the works of several scholars, such as Oskar Loorits, Rudolf Põldmäe, Richard Viidalepp, and Herbert…

Keywords: philology, identity, normativity, research methodology, Friedrich Nietzsche
For about a century, philology as a discipline has been eroding. This has largely been due to the emancipation of some of its subdisciplines, but a marginalisation of the humanities in the contemporary society has catalysed the process, too. This essay attempts to analyse the nature of philology relying on the vision outlined by Friedrich Nietzsche in his inaugural lecture „Homer and classical philology”. According to Nietzsche, philology consists of three subdisciplines: history, language science, and aesthetics, all mixed together in a rather unsystematic way. For Nietzsche, philology has always had pedagogical aims,…

Keywords: linguistics, literary studies, conversation analysis, analysis of literary dialogue
The first half of the article provides a survey of the main directions of the 20th century divergence of linguistics and literary studies.
In the first half of the 20th century, mainstream studies took a synchronic approach to language and literature, addressing language as a system and focusing on individual literary works, their language and style.
The mid-century brought a great divergence. Linguistics changed to embrace functionalism, empiricism and objective analysis. Literary studies, however, fell for the postmodern critical theory, which basically questions the quest for objective knowledge. Literary studies focused on modernism…

Causation is generally defined through its valency-increasing property to bring an additional causer argument onto a basic clause, restricting the focus of research on the verbal predicates and the core sentence. This study argues for the inclusion of the forms belonging outside the core sentence to the scope of linguistic causation. The article discusses the subordinate structures or adjuncts that have a causative relationship to the matrix sentence within the conceptual semantics framework. A two-way causative relationship between the matrix sentence and the adjunct structure is proposed: (i) the adjunct structure causes the situation in the matrix sentence (the beacuse…

The article addresses the relationships of literature and disease on the example of the life and activities of Lilli Suburg (1841–1923).
The life and creative activity of Suburg was affected, on the one hand, by a peculiarity of her appearance, notably, a scar left after a congenital tumor had been removed from her face, due to which she would wear a kerchief over her jaw throughout her life. On the other hand, for many years she suffered from hemorrhages forcing her to bed for long periods, incapacitated to help out her parents with farmwork. That affliction, however, gave Suburg a chance…

The article discusses the inspiring literary commentary published by mentor Ain Kaalep alias O. Muusapoeg ‘lit. O. Son of the Muses’ in the 1960s editions of the magazine Noorus („Youth”), which was officially addressed to the Communist youth of the Estonian SSR. It highlights the rhetoric of irony cleverly hidden between the lines, which could be regarded as critical counterpropaganda. On the one hand, the writings carried an important mission of educating the rising generation in classic literature, Estonian as well as world and from the Antique to the exuberant current literature, trying to fulfil the deficiency in aesthetic knowledge…

The article examines the pragmatics of the Crimean War based texts by Friedrich Nikolai Russow and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, who were both figures of the early stage of the Estonian National Awakening. The texts analysed include Tallinna koddaniko ramat omma söbbradele male („A book from a citizen of Tallinn to his friends in the country”, 1854–1857) and the short poem Söalaul Eestima tüttarlastele („A war song to Estonian girls”, 1854) by Russow, to which F. R. Kreutzwald responded with his poem Sõda („War”, 1854). Although both authors glorify the Tzar and the double-headed eagle, they hardly deserve to be called…

The position of Johannes Vares-Barbarus (1890–1946) in Estonian history and culture is contradictory. On the one hand, he was a remarkable doctor of the name of Vares, on the other hand, a poet named Barbarus, whose modernistic poems were not always appreciated. Moreover, the reception of his works has been complicated by his actions in the 1940s, when he was one of the leading figures in the Sovietization of Estonia. His left-wing views are hardly overlooked whenever himself or his works are discussed. His poetry having received so much more attention than the rest of his works, this article analyzes…

In most of the available descriptions of Estonian, action nominals regularly derived from verbs via mine-suffixation have been classified among nouns, thus being typically addressed from their word class perspective, with the main focus on intraphrasal aspects. However, according to some studies of literary Estonian, certain semantic properties as well as the syntactic distribution of action nominals suggest describing them via the constructions in which they appear. This article investigates one of such hitherto little discussed constructions, namely, a combination of a finite verb olema ‘tobe’ and an action nominal in the nominative or partitive case, based on spontaneous dialect…

The article compares the prose oeuvre of Jaan Oks with certain death camp memoirs with a documentary background, based on the concept of ‘bare life’ borrowed from the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. The hypothesis is that Jaan Oks’s short stories of village life keep consistently outlining the contours of bare life. Bare life means a life emptied from normal human desire for happiness and for a future. The article compares the peasants depicted in Oks’s short stories with the camp residents called ‘Muselmänner’, who had given up fighting for their lives, thus finding themselves halfway between life and death. In…