This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the functions of the present, past an... more This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the functions of the present, past and future perfect forms in standard Latvian and Lithuanian based on two complementary types of data: the typological questionnaire devised for the study of the perfect for the EUROTYP project and the Lithuanian-Latvian parallel corpus. We analyse the data qualitatively as well as quantitatively and demonstrate that the two Baltic languages show both similarities and important differences in their perfect grams. While the Present Perfect in Latvian clearly shows a higher degree of grammaticalisation than in Lithuanian, manifested in the frequency of use, obligatoriness and functional extent, the differences betweenthe two languages in the uses of the other tenses of the perfect are more intricate and largely pertain to the expression of modal and discourse-oriented functions.
This article offers a picture of the Lithuanian perfective present, with particular emphasis on t... more This article offers a picture of the Lithuanian perfective present, with particular emphasis on the treatment of habituality and genericity, the use of aspect forms in narrative text types, and peripheral constructionalised and often pragmatically specialised uses of perfective presents partly harking back to the actional differences underlying the aspect opposition in Baltic as well as in Slavonic. The introductory part of the article offers a general outline of the Lithuanian aspect system and briefly discusses the vexed question of the existence or non-existence of a grammatical category of aspect in Lithuanian. It is argued that, contrary to a widely held view, the Baltic languages have a grammatical category of aspect, though weakly grammaticalised.
The reviewed book about areal phonetics analyses the material of over twenty languages. The first... more The reviewed book about areal phonetics analyses the material of over twenty languages. The first three chapters constitute the introduction of typology, which acquaints with the key concepts of the field. The first chapter describes various ways of language classification: the author moves from a common genealogical classification, perfected when investigating the relationship and development of Indo-European languages, to a typological one, based on origin-independent similarities of language structure, and finishes with a geographical classification which establishes language interaction within a certain territory and the formation of language unions. Other chapters discuss the peculiarities of phonetics of various European languages: the fourth chapter points out the specifics of phonetic convergence, which usually limits to convergence of sound realisation without changing their phonological quality; the fifth chapter proposes the original grouping of South-Eastern European lan...
A corpus-based study of a dedicated deontic possibility modal in Latvian focuses on its impersona... more A corpus-based study of a dedicated deontic possibility modal in Latvian focuses on its impersonal variety with a non-canonical subject in the dative. Normally, drīkstēt ‘may’ and other possibility modals have nominative subjects, while dative subjects are found with expressions of necessity. As distinct from other constructions where non-canonical dative subjects are experiencers, the modals are also used with inanimate subjects.A frequent ellipsis of lexical verbs in the impersonal uses of drīkstēt not only reflects the informal style of the construction but also points to the Russian možno / nel’zja as a possible source, especially when combined with an object in the accusative referring to food. The Russian construction has a meaning of deontic possibility, but its use is restricted to animate subjects. The article claims that the animacy restriction was lifted in Latvian under the influence of the necessity modals in contexts of prohibition.
st Petersburg state university although the traditional account of syllable length in the Baltic ... more st Petersburg state university although the traditional account of syllable length in the Baltic languages confines itself to its connection with syllable tones, other phenomena are also found to be length sensitive. In Lithuanian, syllable length can influence the position of primary stress, while in Latvian it is one of the factors in secondary stress assignment. Several cases of vowel and consonant lengthening, shortening, and deletion can be explained on the assumption that these processes serve the purpose of fitting into a particular unit of quantity. In some instances, the traditional view of the composition of long syllables may need to be revised.
Глагол tikt в латышском языке может иметь значения перемещения в пространстве, изменения состояни... more Глагол tikt в латышском языке может иметь значения перемещения в пространстве, изменения состояния, а также используется как инхоативная связка и как вспомогательный глагол. Употребление tikt исследуется на материале сбалансированного корпуса современного латышского литературного языка. Устанавливаются основные типы значений и контекстов, характерных для tikt, а также выявляются исторические связи между ними. Дополнительно проводится сопоставление результатов, полученных на корпусе современного языка, с данными предварительного исследования текстов начала ХХ в. Библиогр. 11 назв. Табл. 3. Ключевые слова: глагол, инхоативные связки, грамматикализация.
The analysis of data extracted from the Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian reveals that the non-mo... more The analysis of data extracted from the Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian reveals that the non-modal variant of vajadzēt is mostly used with pronouns, especially those referring to the speaker. The modal variant of vajadzēt, on the contrary, is similar to the debitive in that the majority of their dative subjects are non-participants of the speech act, mostly represented by substantives which can be not only animate but also inanimate. In those cases where the modal vajadzēt and the debitive have the speaker as their subjects, they are more likely to receive dynamic meaning. If the subject corresponds to the addressee or non-participants of the speech act, the most frequent interpretation is a deontic one. Epistemic meaning is relatively more common with the modal vajadzēt than with the debitive irrespective of the subject type.
<jats:p>Cynthia Vakareliyska. 2015. Lithuanian Root List. Bloomington. Indiana: Slavica Pub... more <jats:p>Cynthia Vakareliyska. 2015. Lithuanian Root List. Bloomington. Indiana: Slavica Publishers. ISBN: 9780893574475.&#x0D; The book, modelled on Charles Gribble's Russian Root List (1981), is intended for both linguists and students of Lithuanian and addresses problems encountered by non-native speakers when attempting to determine the structure of a longer Lithuanian word and identify the morphemes it consists of. Vakareliyska suggests a solution in the form of a list of the most common modern Lithuanian roots and affixes together with variants and a list of rules responsible for the most regular variants.</jats:p>
<jats:p>A corpus-based study of the two main verbal expressions of necessity in Latvian sho... more <jats:p>A corpus-based study of the two main verbal expressions of necessity in Latvian shows that the much more frequent debitive is commonly used in the present tense without negation while the less frequent vajadzēt is usually found in the subjunctive. An analysis of randomly selected examples of the present, past and future tense and the subjunctive demonstrates an almost identical distribution of deontic and dynamic uses of both modals with respects to grammatical forms without negation. With negation, there is a striking difference between vajadzēt, expressing prohibitions and criticism of past actions, and the debitive, conveying lack of necessity. The article also provides a discussion on how to distinguish between various types of modal meanings in authentic examples from a corpus.&#x0D; </jats:p>
The analysis of data extracted from the Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian reveals that the non-mo... more The analysis of data extracted from the Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian reveals that the non-modal variant of vajadzēt is mostly used with pronouns, especially those referring to the speaker. The modal variant of vajadzēt, on the contrary, is similar to the debitive in that the majority of their dative subjects are non-participants of the speech act, mostly represented by substantives which can be not only animate but also inani-mate. In those cases where the modal vajadzēt and the debitive have the speaker as their subjects, they are more likely to receive dynamic meaning. If the subject corresponds to the addressee or non-participants of the speech act, the most frequent interpretation is a deontic one. Epistemic meaning is relatively more common with the modal vajadzēt than with the debitive irrespective of the subject type.
Depending on the context the Latvian verb dabūt 'get' expresses either necessity or possibility i... more Depending on the context the Latvian verb dabūt 'get' expresses either necessity or possibility in combination with the infinitive, which makes it similar to what is known as "acquisitive modals" in other languages, such as Swedish and Estonian. The Latvian verb is different in that it is implicative rather than modal, i.e. the necessity or possibility that it expresses is always actualized, unless the verb is negated. The use of dabūt with the infinitive has developed from the meaning 'onset of possession' alongside other meanings that include 'displacement/change of state' and 'unpleasant experience/damage', the former also being found with acquisitive verbs in other languages.
The article deals with a constructional idiom attested in both Baltic languages as well as in the... more The article deals with a constructional idiom attested in both Baltic languages as well as in the neighbouring Slavonic and Fennic languages and in Yiddish, containing as its central component what is argued to be an insubordinated imperatival concessive clause and characterising a situation by hyperbolically describing the consequences conceivably flowing from it or a course of action it could be imagined to induce. This construction, which is clearly an areal feature, has a stable constructional meaning but its formal shape is extraordinarily fluid and differentiated. It also displays a considerable degree of cross-linguistic variation partly resulting from separate developments and partly from interaction with other constructional idioms as well as with other languages. The article deals with the structure and origin of the construction and gives an overview of its variation across languages.
The article deals with the facilitative middle, a gram often simply referred to (especially in li... more The article deals with the facilitative middle, a gram often simply referred to (especially in literature of the formal persuasion) as ‘the middle’ (e.g., The bread cuts easily). While in the Western European languages this gram is nearly exclusively generic or individual-level (kind-level) and has no explicit agent (these features are correspondingly often regarded as definitional for ‘middles’), the Baltic and Slavonic languages have constructions that arguably belong to the same gram-type but often represent stage-level predications, with a non-generic agent that is optionally expressed by an oblique noun phrase or prepositional phrase, or is contextually retrievable. The article gives an overview of the parameters of variation in the facilitative constructions of a number of Baltic and Slavonic languages (individual- or kind-level and stage-level readings, aspect, transitivity, expression of the agent, presence or absence of adverbial modifiers etc.). The semantics of the differ...
The article presents a corpus-based investigation of the antipassive reflexive constructions of L... more The article presents a corpus-based investigation of the antipassive reflexive constructions of Latvian. They are subdivided into deobjectives (with suppression of the object) and deaccusatives (with oblique encoding of the object). The emphasis is on the lexical input for the two constructions, frequencies and degrees of lexical entrenchment. The authors identify two subtypes of deobjectives: behaviour-characterising deobjectives (lexically entrenched) and activity deobjectives (weakly entrenched but freely produced ‘online’, hence detectable only through a corpus search). Deaccusatives tend to be lexically entrenched; they are strongly associated with the lexical class of verbs of (chaotic) physical manipulation, but extend beyond this class thanks to processes of metonymy and metaphorisation. The authors argue that while antipassives are often defined as constructions suppressing the object or optionally expressing it as an oblique argument, patientless and patiented antipassives...
The article is a contribution to the study of experiential and indefinite past-tense forms. It of... more The article is a contribution to the study of experiential and indefinite past-tense forms. It offers an analysis of the Latvian past-tense construction tikt + PPA, which is now a feature of the Latvian standard language though it was originally restricted to Eastern Latvia (probably mainly the High Latvian dialects). It can be characterised as an experiential but has a wider scope than the prototypical experiential, which refers to event types in the past without precise location in time. The Latvian construction with tikt can also refer to events that are more precisely anchored in time and then develops into a non-resultative and non-narrative past-tense form reminiscent of the factual imperfective in Russian. The question is also raised whether differences can be found between the use of the construction tikt + PPA in texts reflecting its distribution in the regional dialects where it used to be indigenous and in the modern standard language.
Baltic Linguistics special issue Studies in the TAME Domain in Baltic and its Neighbours, 2021
This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the functions of the present, past an... more This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the functions of the present, past and future perfect forms in standard Latvian and Lithuanian based on two complementary types of data: the typological questionnaire devised for the study of the perfect for the EUROTYP project and the Lithuanian-Latvian parallel corpus. We analyse the data qualitatively as well as quantitatively and demonstrate that the two Baltic languages show both similarities and important differences in their perfect grams. While the Present Perfect in Latvian clearly shows a higher degree of grammaticalisation than in Lithuanian, manifested in the frequency of use, obligatoriness and functional extent, the differences between the two languages in the uses of the other tenses of the perfect are more intricate and largely pertain to the expression of modal and discourse-oriented functions.
This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the functions of the present, past an... more This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the functions of the present, past and future perfect forms in standard Latvian and Lithuanian based on two complementary types of data: the typological questionnaire devised for the study of the perfect for the EUROTYP project and the Lithuanian-Latvian parallel corpus. We analyse the data qualitatively as well as quantitatively and demonstrate that the two Baltic languages show both similarities and important differences in their perfect grams. While the Present Perfect in Latvian clearly shows a higher degree of grammaticalisation than in Lithuanian, manifested in the frequency of use, obligatoriness and functional extent, the differences betweenthe two languages in the uses of the other tenses of the perfect are more intricate and largely pertain to the expression of modal and discourse-oriented functions.
This article offers a picture of the Lithuanian perfective present, with particular emphasis on t... more This article offers a picture of the Lithuanian perfective present, with particular emphasis on the treatment of habituality and genericity, the use of aspect forms in narrative text types, and peripheral constructionalised and often pragmatically specialised uses of perfective presents partly harking back to the actional differences underlying the aspect opposition in Baltic as well as in Slavonic. The introductory part of the article offers a general outline of the Lithuanian aspect system and briefly discusses the vexed question of the existence or non-existence of a grammatical category of aspect in Lithuanian. It is argued that, contrary to a widely held view, the Baltic languages have a grammatical category of aspect, though weakly grammaticalised.
The reviewed book about areal phonetics analyses the material of over twenty languages. The first... more The reviewed book about areal phonetics analyses the material of over twenty languages. The first three chapters constitute the introduction of typology, which acquaints with the key concepts of the field. The first chapter describes various ways of language classification: the author moves from a common genealogical classification, perfected when investigating the relationship and development of Indo-European languages, to a typological one, based on origin-independent similarities of language structure, and finishes with a geographical classification which establishes language interaction within a certain territory and the formation of language unions. Other chapters discuss the peculiarities of phonetics of various European languages: the fourth chapter points out the specifics of phonetic convergence, which usually limits to convergence of sound realisation without changing their phonological quality; the fifth chapter proposes the original grouping of South-Eastern European lan...
A corpus-based study of a dedicated deontic possibility modal in Latvian focuses on its impersona... more A corpus-based study of a dedicated deontic possibility modal in Latvian focuses on its impersonal variety with a non-canonical subject in the dative. Normally, drīkstēt ‘may’ and other possibility modals have nominative subjects, while dative subjects are found with expressions of necessity. As distinct from other constructions where non-canonical dative subjects are experiencers, the modals are also used with inanimate subjects.A frequent ellipsis of lexical verbs in the impersonal uses of drīkstēt not only reflects the informal style of the construction but also points to the Russian možno / nel’zja as a possible source, especially when combined with an object in the accusative referring to food. The Russian construction has a meaning of deontic possibility, but its use is restricted to animate subjects. The article claims that the animacy restriction was lifted in Latvian under the influence of the necessity modals in contexts of prohibition.
st Petersburg state university although the traditional account of syllable length in the Baltic ... more st Petersburg state university although the traditional account of syllable length in the Baltic languages confines itself to its connection with syllable tones, other phenomena are also found to be length sensitive. In Lithuanian, syllable length can influence the position of primary stress, while in Latvian it is one of the factors in secondary stress assignment. Several cases of vowel and consonant lengthening, shortening, and deletion can be explained on the assumption that these processes serve the purpose of fitting into a particular unit of quantity. In some instances, the traditional view of the composition of long syllables may need to be revised.
Глагол tikt в латышском языке может иметь значения перемещения в пространстве, изменения состояни... more Глагол tikt в латышском языке может иметь значения перемещения в пространстве, изменения состояния, а также используется как инхоативная связка и как вспомогательный глагол. Употребление tikt исследуется на материале сбалансированного корпуса современного латышского литературного языка. Устанавливаются основные типы значений и контекстов, характерных для tikt, а также выявляются исторические связи между ними. Дополнительно проводится сопоставление результатов, полученных на корпусе современного языка, с данными предварительного исследования текстов начала ХХ в. Библиогр. 11 назв. Табл. 3. Ключевые слова: глагол, инхоативные связки, грамматикализация.
The analysis of data extracted from the Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian reveals that the non-mo... more The analysis of data extracted from the Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian reveals that the non-modal variant of vajadzēt is mostly used with pronouns, especially those referring to the speaker. The modal variant of vajadzēt, on the contrary, is similar to the debitive in that the majority of their dative subjects are non-participants of the speech act, mostly represented by substantives which can be not only animate but also inanimate. In those cases where the modal vajadzēt and the debitive have the speaker as their subjects, they are more likely to receive dynamic meaning. If the subject corresponds to the addressee or non-participants of the speech act, the most frequent interpretation is a deontic one. Epistemic meaning is relatively more common with the modal vajadzēt than with the debitive irrespective of the subject type.
<jats:p>Cynthia Vakareliyska. 2015. Lithuanian Root List. Bloomington. Indiana: Slavica Pub... more <jats:p>Cynthia Vakareliyska. 2015. Lithuanian Root List. Bloomington. Indiana: Slavica Publishers. ISBN: 9780893574475.&#x0D; The book, modelled on Charles Gribble's Russian Root List (1981), is intended for both linguists and students of Lithuanian and addresses problems encountered by non-native speakers when attempting to determine the structure of a longer Lithuanian word and identify the morphemes it consists of. Vakareliyska suggests a solution in the form of a list of the most common modern Lithuanian roots and affixes together with variants and a list of rules responsible for the most regular variants.</jats:p>
<jats:p>A corpus-based study of the two main verbal expressions of necessity in Latvian sho... more <jats:p>A corpus-based study of the two main verbal expressions of necessity in Latvian shows that the much more frequent debitive is commonly used in the present tense without negation while the less frequent vajadzēt is usually found in the subjunctive. An analysis of randomly selected examples of the present, past and future tense and the subjunctive demonstrates an almost identical distribution of deontic and dynamic uses of both modals with respects to grammatical forms without negation. With negation, there is a striking difference between vajadzēt, expressing prohibitions and criticism of past actions, and the debitive, conveying lack of necessity. The article also provides a discussion on how to distinguish between various types of modal meanings in authentic examples from a corpus.&#x0D; </jats:p>
The analysis of data extracted from the Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian reveals that the non-mo... more The analysis of data extracted from the Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian reveals that the non-modal variant of vajadzēt is mostly used with pronouns, especially those referring to the speaker. The modal variant of vajadzēt, on the contrary, is similar to the debitive in that the majority of their dative subjects are non-participants of the speech act, mostly represented by substantives which can be not only animate but also inani-mate. In those cases where the modal vajadzēt and the debitive have the speaker as their subjects, they are more likely to receive dynamic meaning. If the subject corresponds to the addressee or non-participants of the speech act, the most frequent interpretation is a deontic one. Epistemic meaning is relatively more common with the modal vajadzēt than with the debitive irrespective of the subject type.
Depending on the context the Latvian verb dabūt 'get' expresses either necessity or possibility i... more Depending on the context the Latvian verb dabūt 'get' expresses either necessity or possibility in combination with the infinitive, which makes it similar to what is known as "acquisitive modals" in other languages, such as Swedish and Estonian. The Latvian verb is different in that it is implicative rather than modal, i.e. the necessity or possibility that it expresses is always actualized, unless the verb is negated. The use of dabūt with the infinitive has developed from the meaning 'onset of possession' alongside other meanings that include 'displacement/change of state' and 'unpleasant experience/damage', the former also being found with acquisitive verbs in other languages.
The article deals with a constructional idiom attested in both Baltic languages as well as in the... more The article deals with a constructional idiom attested in both Baltic languages as well as in the neighbouring Slavonic and Fennic languages and in Yiddish, containing as its central component what is argued to be an insubordinated imperatival concessive clause and characterising a situation by hyperbolically describing the consequences conceivably flowing from it or a course of action it could be imagined to induce. This construction, which is clearly an areal feature, has a stable constructional meaning but its formal shape is extraordinarily fluid and differentiated. It also displays a considerable degree of cross-linguistic variation partly resulting from separate developments and partly from interaction with other constructional idioms as well as with other languages. The article deals with the structure and origin of the construction and gives an overview of its variation across languages.
The article deals with the facilitative middle, a gram often simply referred to (especially in li... more The article deals with the facilitative middle, a gram often simply referred to (especially in literature of the formal persuasion) as ‘the middle’ (e.g., The bread cuts easily). While in the Western European languages this gram is nearly exclusively generic or individual-level (kind-level) and has no explicit agent (these features are correspondingly often regarded as definitional for ‘middles’), the Baltic and Slavonic languages have constructions that arguably belong to the same gram-type but often represent stage-level predications, with a non-generic agent that is optionally expressed by an oblique noun phrase or prepositional phrase, or is contextually retrievable. The article gives an overview of the parameters of variation in the facilitative constructions of a number of Baltic and Slavonic languages (individual- or kind-level and stage-level readings, aspect, transitivity, expression of the agent, presence or absence of adverbial modifiers etc.). The semantics of the differ...
The article presents a corpus-based investigation of the antipassive reflexive constructions of L... more The article presents a corpus-based investigation of the antipassive reflexive constructions of Latvian. They are subdivided into deobjectives (with suppression of the object) and deaccusatives (with oblique encoding of the object). The emphasis is on the lexical input for the two constructions, frequencies and degrees of lexical entrenchment. The authors identify two subtypes of deobjectives: behaviour-characterising deobjectives (lexically entrenched) and activity deobjectives (weakly entrenched but freely produced ‘online’, hence detectable only through a corpus search). Deaccusatives tend to be lexically entrenched; they are strongly associated with the lexical class of verbs of (chaotic) physical manipulation, but extend beyond this class thanks to processes of metonymy and metaphorisation. The authors argue that while antipassives are often defined as constructions suppressing the object or optionally expressing it as an oblique argument, patientless and patiented antipassives...
The article is a contribution to the study of experiential and indefinite past-tense forms. It of... more The article is a contribution to the study of experiential and indefinite past-tense forms. It offers an analysis of the Latvian past-tense construction tikt + PPA, which is now a feature of the Latvian standard language though it was originally restricted to Eastern Latvia (probably mainly the High Latvian dialects). It can be characterised as an experiential but has a wider scope than the prototypical experiential, which refers to event types in the past without precise location in time. The Latvian construction with tikt can also refer to events that are more precisely anchored in time and then develops into a non-resultative and non-narrative past-tense form reminiscent of the factual imperfective in Russian. The question is also raised whether differences can be found between the use of the construction tikt + PPA in texts reflecting its distribution in the regional dialects where it used to be indigenous and in the modern standard language.
Baltic Linguistics special issue Studies in the TAME Domain in Baltic and its Neighbours, 2021
This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the functions of the present, past an... more This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the functions of the present, past and future perfect forms in standard Latvian and Lithuanian based on two complementary types of data: the typological questionnaire devised for the study of the perfect for the EUROTYP project and the Lithuanian-Latvian parallel corpus. We analyse the data qualitatively as well as quantitatively and demonstrate that the two Baltic languages show both similarities and important differences in their perfect grams. While the Present Perfect in Latvian clearly shows a higher degree of grammaticalisation than in Lithuanian, manifested in the frequency of use, obligatoriness and functional extent, the differences between the two languages in the uses of the other tenses of the perfect are more intricate and largely pertain to the expression of modal and discourse-oriented functions.
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