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Reading and writing in Latgalian constitute an added literacy within a multilingual repertoire of skills and practices where Standard Latvian dominates. In this situation, the social and symbolic values of literacy and orthography are more important than their practical value in everyday life. This paper discusses the historical development and the current importance of the Latgalian written language from such a perspective. We draw on a case study on language attitudes conducted in 2019 as well as our observations of literacy practices and the public discourse around them during the past 20 years. For the case study, 47 semi-structured interviews were conducted with active members of the speech community. All respondents had a decidedly positive attitude towards the Latgalian written language and its use in public domains. Debates concern spelling standards and correctness, indicating the importance of visuality especially for lesser-used languages. Script ideologies form part of the community’s overall set of beliefs and constitute an important factor of varied Latgalian identities and lifestyles. The focus on standards may however have a negative effect on attitudes and practices. We claim that social aspects of writing, centring around identity, interlinguality, iconicity, and authority, must be considered in planning Latgalian literacy education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the use of future tense in Latvian and Lithuanian in narratives that are located in the past. The data come from corpora of the contemporary languages as well as from folktales documented at the end of the 19th century. While the future is rarely used to tell a story, it does appear in certain functions in clauses that meet all or a part of the criteria for narrative clauses. We distinguish three groups of uses, with increasing degrees of narrativity: (a) imagined and evoked scenarios, including evoking habitual actions in the past; (b) a cluster of meanings around intention, imminence, and inception; (c) functions of text organization and grounding. Purely textual functions are only found in the folktales. Furthermore, switches to future tense in Baltic folktales show similar characteristics as switches from past to present tense in Romance languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 the Latvian cumulative-experiential subtype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the first empirical study of the construction TAKE (and) V ("he took and left" = 'he left suddenly, unexpectedly') in contemporary Latvian and Lithuanian, carried out on a large sample of corpus data. The results obtained for Baltic are compared with Slavic (Polish, Russian) and Finnic (Estonian, Finnish) data from comparable corpora. It is argued that out of all the languages under consideration, in Baltic the construction is the most frequent and the most fixed in its form, while at the same time being able to appear in various inflectional forms and in various functions. Other languages differ in how they deviate from the Baltic type. IL is also shown that its semantics is largely context-dependent, being sensitive to the semantics of the inflectional form, subject and type of the lexical verb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latvian may express continuative aspect by means of a complex construction which consists of a verb and a locative phrase headed by an action noun from the same verb. The construction is productive and attested with a variety of durative verbs. Salient exemplars are some verbs of talking and crying. In a clause the construction most often is treated in the same way as simple verb forms. Formally and functionally the construction is related to three other cognate constructions in Latvian as well as to iteration of the type talk and talk. However, in these other constructions continuative meaning arises only as an implicature or contains more specific nuances. It is proposed that cognate constructions may form a link between morphological reduplication and syntactic iteration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates techniques of clause combining in spoken Latgalian, based on a corpus of 5 hours of recorded interviews with eleven speakers from different parts of Latgalia (Eastern Latvia). The study focuses on inter-clausal relations that are most typically expressed by adverbial clauses and in grammars of European languages are largely associated with adverbial subordinators such as English when, if, because, or although. In spoken Latgalian these relations are most often marked by a combination of lexical, grammatical and prosodic features. Patterns described in detail include asyndetic constructions with grammatical marking, clause chaining, clause combining with semantically vague or polysemous connectives, and correlative constructions. The study calls for a broad understanding of adverbial clause combining, without recourse to the problematic concept of subordination and without assuming the complex sentence as a syntactic or textual unit. Such an approach is needed to pay justice to the intricate structures of fluent speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine transitivity pairs in the two modern Baltic languages Lithuanian and Latvian and compare them to neighbouring Finnic (Finnish, Estonian) and Slavic (Russian, Polish) languages. In Slavic the main strategy is to derive the intransitive (noncausal) verb from the transitive (causal) verb, while in Finnic we find a high number of derived causatives. Baltic uses both techniques, and in addition, there is a higher number of pairs where either both verbs are marked, or two etymologically related verbs are underived from a synchronic point of view. Differences and similarities across the six languages are investigated, using a list of 20 notions divided into five groups. Special attention is paid to animacy and to the distinction between inchoative and durative noncausal verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes guidelines for interlinear morpheme glossing of modern Latvian and Lithuanian. The general principles follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules, a widely accepted standard in contemporary linguistics. The authors show how these rules may be adapted to the specifics of Baltic morphology. Details of nominal and verbal morphology of Latvian and Lithuanian are discussed and illustrated with examples of adequate glossing. Wherever possible, the same principles are proposed for both Latvian and Lithuanian, which will facilitate a comparison of these languages. However, different solutions are proposed in some cases where the two languages differ significantly and different interpretations are possible, and those are discussed in particular detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past two decades, research on first language acquisition on the one side, and on second language acquisition and learning on the other have largely developed separately, probably as a reaction to the failure of earlier attempts to use the same methods or simply transfer insights gained in one of the fields to the other. T his article argues that a reconciliation may be fruitful, provided that different aspects which have often got blurred in the discussion are considered separately. These aspects include the assessment of multilingualism and monolingualism, the age factor and the definition of 'first' and 'second' language, the understanding of linguistic competence and of completeness of acquisition, different forms of acquisition and learning, and uniformity vs. individual differences in the process of language acquisition. By challenging some widely held views on characteristics of first language acquisition and its differences to second language learning, more fine-grained research questions are revealed, some of which have been addressed in recent studies on language acquisition and multilingualism [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores semantic and grammatical properties of Latvian agent nouns that are derived from verbs by the suffix -ēj- (for primary verbs) or -tāj- (for secondary verbs). These formations show several peculiarities that distinguish them from agent nouns in other European languages and from similar Latvian nouns formed by other means. They are specialized in meaning, highly regular and transparent. They show verbal features such as aspectuality and combinability with adverbs, and they may inherit verbal arguments. The productivity of the formation is almost unlimited, and many ad hoc formations are found in colloquial style, for example in social media. In discourse, agent nouns often have a referential function, either as the only function or in combination with a concept-building function. The focus of the article is on less institutionalized tokens which show the potential of this morphological process that challenges traditional views about the functions of derivation or its delimitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the system of noun declension in Latvian and Latgalian. It is claimed that despite superficial similarities the principles underlying the two systems are different. In Latvian, a characteristic vowel that has no other function than to distinguish classes is present in most case-endings. In Latgalian inflectional morphology, on the other hand, an important feature is the distinction between phonologically hard vs. soft stems. In the case of hybrid nouns, a conflict between inherited membership to a declension class and morphophonological principles leads to variation in case-assignment. The data support the thesis that in the case of external motivation class-membership loses its function of predicting the forms of a paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]