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.
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.
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 the agentive construction, a construction identifying the agent used mainly in adnominal position and in the position of nominal predicate but distinct from the agented passive. The notion is known from Finnish grammar (where it has dedicated morphological marking, the agentive participle), but the article describes a similar construction in Latvian. The marking of the agent in the Fennic and Baltic agentive construction is possessive, which points to an areal convergence. The article offers a corpus-based analysis of the lexical input and the semantics of the Latvian agentive construction and discusses the relationship between the agentive construction and the resultative passive. Attention is also given to intra-Baltic historical processes, notably to mechanisms of the rise of an agented passive in Lithuanian from an original agentive construction as retained in Latvian.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.