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We provide a critical review of the distinction between 'comparative concepts' and 'descriptive categories', showing that in current typological practice the former are usually dependent on the latter and are often vague, being organized around prototypes rather than having sharp boundaries. We also propose a classification of comparative concepts, arguing that their definitions can be based on similarities between languages or on differences between languages or can also be 'blind' to language-particular facts. We conclude that, first, comparative concepts and descriptive categories are ontologically not as distinct as some typologists would like to have it, and, second, that attempts at a 'non-aprioristic' approach to linguistic description and language typology are more of an illusion than reality or even a desideratum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of an areal-typological study of prefixal perfectivization in Slavic, Baltic, Yiddish, Hungarian, Ossetic and Kartvelian languages based on a uniform set of morphological and functional-semantic parameters. It is shown that there are two clusters of prefixal perfectivization, i.e., Slavic and Kartvelian, while other languages display significant degrees of difference both from each other and from the two clusters. It is further argued on the basis of existing evidence that the development and distribution of the current “landscape” of preverb-based aspectual systems in the languages of Central and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus have been shaped by a complex interplay of genetic, typological and contact factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prefix be-, which appears in a variety of verbal forms and constructions in Lithuanian, has not been subject to a detailed and theoretically informed synchronic description. This paper attempts to fill this gap by providing an account of the two most clearly identifiable aspectual uses of be-: (I) its being part of the periphrastic forms expressing the avertive meaning recently established as a cross-linguistic gram; (ii) its use in the positive and negative continuative forms. I discuss the semantics and use of these constructions, and pay particular attention to their interactions with other aspectually relevant categories of Lithuanian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the previously barely described restrictive use of the prefix te- in Lithuanian. This prefix, whose meaning is similar to that of the particle tik 'only', is peculiar in that it can take scope over almost any kind of phrases, including constituents of non-finite embedded clauses. In this paper, morphosyntactic properties and scope of the restrictive re- are analysed on the basis of both elicited and corpus data. Besides that, it is shown that from a cross-linguistic point of view, a restrictive affix displaying both rigid verb-adjacency and scope flexibility is quite rare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]