1. The established view of the Estonian adessive is that the form is not only historically but also synchronically a locative case in its primary function, denoting the place where someone/something is, where something happens, or where some activity is being done.
A survey of present-day Estonian text shows, however, that the occurrence of the adessive case in the locative meaning is not as common as grammarians think. Table 1 below shows a breakdown of all the occurrences of the adessive case in a 36.700-word Estonian text. It shows the relative infrequency of the locative use of the adessive: it accounts for a mere quarter of its occurrences in the text. The table also shows that what is traditionally regarded as its secondary and derived usage, namely what I call the dative use (hence the term adessive-dative), is considerably more frequent than the locative use.
| Table 1: The Use of the Estonian Adessive | ||
|---|---|---|
| Occurences | % | |
| Adessive-Dative | 458 | 45 |
| Temporal | 255 | 25 |
| Locative | 251 | 25 |
| Instrumental/Manner | 52 | 5 |
| Total | 1016 | 100 |
It should be noted that the statistic data presented here are derived from the written language, where the use of the adessive case in the locative meaning is more frequent than in the spoken language. In spoken Estonian, where there is a tendency for postpositional phrases with peal 'on', etc. to be preferred to the pure adessive form in the locative meaning, the infrequency of the locative use would be more conspicuous.
In what follows I will describe the adessive-dative, or the dative use of the adessive case, and show how the functional versatility of the Estonian adessive can be described in an appropriate way without recourse to the assumption that it is a locative case.