Learning Estonian through advertising (6)
Liivalaia tn, 12. september 2015
Laps ei ole süüdi, et temast narkodiiler tehakse.
Here you see an example of a verb form you rarely see in advertising (the impersonal) here shown by tehakse, the impersonal of the verb tegema ‘make, do’.
The present impersonal is formed by using the stem of the -tud participle and, for the most part, adding -takse or -dakse. If the verb's tud-partciple is of the form tud then the impersonal will take -takse, and if the verb takes the form dud then the impersonal will end in -dakse.
The verb tegema is a little different in that its present impersonal form is tehakse and not *tehtakse; ma-infinitive tegema, da-infinitive teha, tud-participle tehtud.
“A child is not guilty, that a drugdealer is made of them.”
The impersonal is different from a passive. In The Uses of Impersonals in Spoken Estonian, Torn-Leesik and Vihman state:
“Although passive and impersonal voice may appear similar in communicative function, in fact they are different constructions with different morphosyntactic constraints. While the passive is a valency-reducing operation that demotes the subject of the active transitive clause, impersonalization merely constrains argument realization and does not affect the valency of the verb” (pp. 302-303).
The relative clause, et temast narkodiiler tehakse, could also be rewritten using the passive structure (verb olema ‘be’ and tud-participle):
et temast narkodiiler on tehtud.
In the text we find an example of a borrowing (narkodiiler), which includes the prefix narko-, present in such words as narkomaan ‘junkie’, narkoärikas ‘drug dealer’ and narkosõltuvus ‘drug addiction’; ärikas ‘businessman’, slang for ärimees < äri ‘business’ + mees ‘man’; sõltuvus ‘addiction, dependence’.
Torn-Leesik, R.; Vihman, V.-A. (2010). The uses of impersonals in spoken Estonian. SKY Journal of Linguistics, 23, 301-343.
