Grammar: Partial vs Full objects

How Estonian expresses ongoing actions

What’s an object and why does it matter?

The “target of the action” in a sentence is usually called the “object” of the sentence by linguists.

When speaking about English, you might have heard English being called an SVO language: Subject-Verb-Object.

This refers to the common word order in a sentence:

• First comes the Subject - who is doing the action,

• then the Verb - what is the action,

• and finally the Object - to whom the action is being done.

Why it matters

The vast majority of languages have a way of distinguishing between actions that are perceived as ongoing, and not yielding a clear result from actions that are the opposite: instantaneous, yielding a clear result.

Russian solves this problem by using different so-called aspects: every verb comes in a pair: one version for ongoing action (делать) and one version for action done until completion (сделать).

English makes this distinction using progressive forms of verbs: “I do” vs “I am doing”.

Estonian also needs a way to address this problem.