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.
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.
In diesem Beitrag werden erstmals Überlegungen zu einer Grammatik vorgelegt, die das Deutsche und das Litauische einerseits aus formaler und andererseits aus funktionaler Perspektive vergleichend gegenüberstellt. Unter Bezugnahme auf jüngere deskriptive Konzeptionen in der Grammatikographie wie auch auf bewährte kontrastive ansätze wird diskutiert, wie sich in einer solchen Grammatik sowohl allgemein-vergleichende bzw. typologische als auch kontrastive aspekte vereinbaren lassen. Es werden wichtige Ergebnisse der kritischen auseinandersetzung mit mehreren bereits erschienenen kontrastiven Grammatiken Deutsch -Sprache X einbezogen, und es wird die Frage nach dem Benutzerkreis und die Problematik der Mehrfachadressierung einer Grammatik diskutiert. Daran schließt sich ein kurzer Überblick über bereits erschienene Beiträge zum deutsch-litauischen Sprachvergleich an, auf die das vorgestellte Vorhaben zurückgreifen kann. Schließlich wird die Konzeption einer Grammatik des Deutschen und des Litauischen im Vergleich mit ihren unterschiedlichen Teilkomponenten skizziert sowie ein Ausblick auf die nächsten Schritte zur Ausführung der Projektidee gegeben.
The present article introduces the ambidirectional, a construction (or sometimes just a distinct type of use of a gram basically serving another function) referring to two-way motion events in the past. The discussion starts out from the notion of absentive, which has already established itself in the literature since de Groot (2000). In many languages the construction ‘be’ + INF, claimed to be an absentive, exists only in a past-tense variety. It is argued that such constructions do not meet the definitional criteria for absentives. We here propose to describe them as ambidirectionals, by which we understand a construction (or a specific type of use of a gram with a broader array of functions) denoting two-way motion-cum-purpose events in the past. The absentive can be characterised as a particular type of use of an ambidirectional construction, which allows different focusing: either a holistic view is given of the motion event or its outward point is focused upon, and in the latter case the presence of an external observer yields the absentive interpretation. The fact that the constructions involved are basically ambidirectional explains why in many languages they are restricted to the past, while other languages allow occasional or regular extensions to the domain of the present.
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