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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 th century. While the future is rarely used to tell a story, it does appear in certainfunctions 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.

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. It 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.

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.

Peter Arkadiev, Axel Holvoet & Björn Wiemer, eds. 2015. Contemporary Approaches to Baltic Linguistics. (trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 276). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. ISBN: 978-3-11-034376-2. Only in recent years have we witnessed an increase of interest and scholarly activities regarding the Baltic languages, and for today's audience it may be more worthwhile to watch what is going on than no ponder over results. This volume provides an excellent opportunity to do so, presenting 13 individual studies by an international cast. They are preceded by an introductory article by the editors which has the lenght of a small monograph and is probably the most comprehensive overview of state of the art of Baltic linguistics that has ever been written.

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.

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.

nicole nau. First and second language acquisition: Towards a reconcillation. the poznan Society for the advancement of the arts and Sciences. pl ISSn 0079-4740, ISBn 978-83-7654-384-0, pp. 125–140 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. this 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.

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.

Dace Prauliņš, Latvian. An Essential Grammar. London & New York: Routledge, 2012. ɪsʙɴ 978-0-415-57692-5. Descriptive grammars of Modern Latvian written in English are still something of a rarity, and any such book will be warmly welcomed bylinguists as well as by the growing number of people learning Latvian all over the world. It is for the latter group that Dace Prauliņš wrote this book, and it would be unfair to review it as a scholarly contribution to the analysis of Latvian grammar.

1. Preface 2. Introduction (by Holvoet, Axel) 3. Case marking and case alternations 4. Long-distance Genitive of Negation in Lithuanian (by Arkadiev, Peter M.) 5. Argument marking in Baltic and Slavonic pain-verb constructions (by Holvoet, Axel) 6. Variable argument realization in Lithuanian impersonals (by Lavine, James E.) 7. The nominative case in Baltic in a typological perspective (by Serzant, Ilja A.) 8. Differential Argument Marking with the Latvian debitive: A multifactorial analysis (by Serzant, Ilja A.) 9. Contexts for the choice of genitive vs. instrumental in contemporary Lithuanian (by Wiemer, Bjorn) 10. The directive/locative alternation in Lithuanian and elsewhere (by Zaika, Natalia M.) 11. Extending argument structure 12. Verbal prefixation and argument structure in Lithuanian (by Kozhanov, Kirill) 13. Resultative secondary predicates in the Baltic languages (by Riaubiene, Benita) 14. On periphrastic causative constructions in Lithuanian and Latvian (by Pakerys, Jurgis) 15. Nominalizations and their arugument structure 16. Argument realization in Latvian action nominal constructions: A corpus and text based investigation (by Nau, Nicole) 17. Lithuanian nominalizations and the case marking of their arguments (by Zaika, Natalia M.) 18. Language index 19. Name index 20. Subject index

Ile jest dzisiaj języków na świecie? Liczba podana w naszej książce może być zaskakująca, zwłaszcza, że jest ona kilkunastokrotnie wyższa niż liczba państw na świecie. Języki również cały czas powstają – czy to za sprawą indywidualnego rozwoju dialektów danego języka czy też mieszania się różnych języków w społeczeństwach wielojęzycznych. Niestety, języki o wiele częściej zanikają niż powstają, co powoduje, że ogólna liczba języków wcale nie wzrasta, a wręcz dramatycznie maleje. Trudno przewidzieć, ile języków będzie nadal używanych za kilkanaście - kilkadziesiąt lat, jednak wstępne prognozy są pesymistyczne: połowa z obecnie używanych języków umrze. Nasze języki są w niebezpieczeństwie i nie jest to sprawa, którą interesują się wyłącznie językoznawcy. Różnorodność językowa to część różnorodności kulturowej, która cechuje człowieczeństwo – i jest ona skarbem, a nie ciężarem. Z pomocą tej książki dowiesz się, co niesie ze sobą ten skarb: fascynujący świat języków.

1. Preface 2. Voice in Baltic: An overview (by Nau, Nicole) 3. Part I. Causatives 4. Lithuanian morphological causatives: A corpus-based study (by Arkadiev, Peter M.) 5. Morphological causatives in contemporary Latvian (by Nau, Nicole) 6. Extended uses of morphological causatives in Latvian (by Holvoet, Axel) 7. Part II. Reflexives and middle voice 8. Middle voice reflexives and argument structure in Baltic (by Holvoet, Axel) 9. Converse relations with the reflexive marker in Lithuanian and Polish: Between grammar and lexicon (by Wiemer, Bjorn) 10. Part III. Passives 11. Passivization and argument structure in Lithuanian (by Anderson, Cori) 12. Solving the puzzle of the Lithuanian passive (by Sprauniene, Birute) 13. Latvian passives - personal, impersonal and evidential (by Holvoet, Axel) 14. Language index 15. Name index 16. Subject index

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.