Antipassive reflexive constructions in Latvian

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 are actually different constructions with constructional meanings of their own. While deobjectives conceptualise agency as a self-contained event even though an object is notionally required, deaccusatives convey low affectedness of the object.

(Non-)agreement of passive participles in South-Eastern Lithuanian

The phenomenon of non-agreement of passive participles (mostly t-participles) is discussed on the basis of the TriMCo corpus of South-Eastern Lithuanian dialects. A quantitative analysis of the examples shows that non-agreeing t-participles appear significantly more often in East Aukštaitian than in South Aukštaitian. It is also shown that plural subjects and position of the participle before the subject increase the probability of the non-agreeing form. At the same time we show that (non-)agreement of passive constructions in South-Eastern Lithuanian dialects does not correlate with the semantic type of passive. We also argue that the Lithuanian dialectal constructions with non-agreeing passive participles are most probably not related to the similar constructions in East Slavic (either areally, or diachronically). The non-agreeing passive constructions are also not areally related to non-agreeing active participle constructions, but probably illustrate the same tendency for the lack of agreement with plural subjects.

The Passive Family in Baltic

Predicative constructions with passive participles in Latvian and Lithuanian exhibit great variation in form, meaning and function, ranging from pure passive to various temporal, aspectual and modal meanings. This paper uses a set of formal and functional parameters to distinguish and profile several types and subtypes of such constructions. These types are mutually related by family resemblance and constitute a ‘Passive Family’. They include dynamic and stative passives, three types of resultatives, several types of subjectless (impersonal) passives, modal constructions expressing possibility or necessity, and evidential constructions. Based on a thorough study of corpus data, the paper not only adds new insights about constructions that were already known, but also presents construction types that have not been discussed in the literature on the Baltic passive before: the Lithuanian cumulative-retrospective construction and theLatvian cumulative-experiential subtype.

The facilitative middle in Baltic and North Slavonic

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 different varieties is discussed, as well as their lexical input. Attention is given to the grammaticalisation path and to what made the Balto-Slavonic type of facilitatives so markedly different from their counterparts in Western European languages.

The rise of the affixal reflexive in Baltic and its consequences

The article deals with the consequences of the affixalisation of the formerly enclitic reflexive pronoun in the Baltic languages. This affixalisation caused a reorganisation in the system of reflexive marking, as the new affixal forms became restricted to middle-voice meanings. The Old Lithuanian and Old Latvian texts reflect a transitional stage in this process. Oscillations in the choice of a verbal form to which an affixalising reflexive pronoun could accrete led to the rise of interesting morphosyntactic patterns with double or varying placement of the affixal marker. The disappearance of the reflexive marker from the syntax furthermore caused syntactic changes leading to the rise of new grammatical constructions. This is discussed in the article for permissive constructions as well as for raising constructions with verbs of saying and propositional attitude. The emphasis on the affixalisation process and on the semantic, morphosyntactic and syntactic processes it set in motion provides a common thread linking a number of seemingly unconnected changes. Though occurring in the prehistory of the Baltic languages, the affixalisation led to a chain of diachronic processes extending to the early 21th century.

The voice domain in Baltic and its neighbours

This article outlines the aims, methodological approaches and research topics of the thematic volume Studies in the Voice Domain in Baltic and Its Neighbours. It also briefly characterises the individual contributions to the volume, highlighting their main ideas and pointing out their relevance to ongoing discussions as well as the impulses they can give to further (also cross-linguistic) research. The grammatical domains explored in the volume are the passive, the middle voice and the causative.

Impersonal constructions with personal reference.

This paper explores referential features of deleted actors in impersonal passive and impersonal constructions in three languages: Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian. Though cross-linguistically passive or impersonal verb forms of intransitive verbs are generally associated with indefinite human agency, our study shows that this correlation is not absolute: in the investigated languages passives and impersonals of intransitives, apart from generic and indefinite actors, may also imply contextually given, definite actors, and for some constructions, e.g. Estonian impersonals with the auxiliary saama ‘get’, this is actually their main use. Data for our study comes from large comparable corpora of web resources. In a small quantitative study we determine the factors that condition a personal use of an impersonal verb form in the three languages. The most important factors are verbal lexeme (certain lexemes show a greater preference for certain types of covert actors), as well as construction type: of two formally distinct impersonal (passive) constructions, one is preferred in non-impersonal functions where the covert actor is a contextually given person.

Lithuanian intensive causatives and their history

The article deals with a small group of Lithuanian verbs in which causative morphology has acquired an intensive function. While causative-intensive polyfunctionality is well attested typologically, the Lithuanian instance is interesting in that the intensive function manifests itself in reflexivised causatives. This development seems to be a consequence of the co-occurrence of causative and reflexive derivation as devices for building transitivity pairs in Baltic. The combination of the two devices yields intransitivised causatives that become semantically differentiated from the corresponding primary intransitives through developing an intensive function.

Exploring the asymmetric coding of autobenefactive in Lithuanian and beyond

In this paper, I investigate a group of semantically close functions marked by the Reflexive marker in Lithuanian, which I address as autobenefactive. I provide a classification of these functions and then turn to a marking asymmetry which is characteristic of the them, namely the tendency to occur in perfective contexts and not to occur in progressive contexts. On the basis of a questionnaire, I show that this tendency indeed exists, although different verbs are involved to different degrees, and we are presumably witnessing an ongoing grammaticalization process. I then compare the Lithuanian marking asymmetry to a phenomenon in Georgian, in which the use of “subjective version” exhibits a similar kind of asymmetry with some groups of verbs. In the concluding section, I propose a typological explanation of the observed asymmetry, hypothesizing that the markers of both languages function in a way parallel to so-called “bounders” – telicizers with primary spatial meanings.

New insights on Lithuanian accentuation from the unpublished manuscripts of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)

At his death, the great linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) left a considerable amount of papers, drafts and documents, some of them dealing with the Lithuanian language. Only in 1996 were they given to the public library of Geneva. The aim of this paper is to present some of the new insights offered by these unpublished documents in the field of Lithuanian accentuation. The majority of the documents pertaining to Lithuanian accentuation were written by Saussure over a time span of almost ten years between 1888 and 1896 in Paris and Geneva; some of them are later notes from a course on the Lithuanian language given by Saussure in 1901–1902 in Geneva. These manuscripts shed some light on a research field that still remains a relatively neglected part of Saussure’s scientific production. They bring new insights on crucial issues such as the origins of the Lithuanian intonations or the Baltic metatony.