Abstract
This article offers an analysis of the morphosyntactic properties of Lithuanian participles in terms of the criteria of “canonical” finiteness proposed by (Nikolaeva, Irina. 2013. Unpacking finiteness. In Dunstan Brown, Marina Chumakina & Greville G. Corbett (eds.), Canonical morphology and syntax, 99–122. Oxford: Oxford University Press.). It is shown that in their different uses, i. e., as heads of two types of evidential clauses, as predicates in complement, adverbial and attributive clauses and as lexical verbs in periphrastic constructions, Lithuanian participles show considerably different combinations of finite and nonfinite characteristics and hence cannot be unequivocally treated as nonfinite. It is argued that it is the individual constructions where the participles occur that determine their morphosyntactic features and that the very notion of (non)finiteness is composite and largely derivative.
Abbreviations
- 1
1st person
- 2
2nd person
- 3
3rd person
- acc
Accusative
- all
Allative
- aux
Auxiliary verb
- cnt
Continuative
- cvb
Converb
- comp
Comparative
- dat
Dative
- def
Definite
- dem
Demonstrative
- df
Default agreement form
- f
Feminine
- fut
Future
- gen
Genitive
- hab
Habitual
- imp
Imperative
- inan
Inanimate
- inf
Infinitive
- ins
Instrumental
- intf
Intensifier
- irr
Irrealis
- loc
Locative
- m
Masculine
- neg
Negation
- nom
Nominative
- pa
Active participle
- pl
Plural
- pp
Passive participle
- prs
Present
- prv
Preverb
- pst
Past
- q
Question particle
- rfl
Reflexive
- rposs
Reflexive possessive
- sg
Singular
- sprl
Superlative
Acknowledgements
I thank all my Lithuanian consultants and all those who helped me in the course of my research stays in Vilnius in 2008–2013, especially Axel Holvoet. Preliminary versions of this paper have been presented at the 1st conference “Problems of Language: Young Researchers’ Perspective” (Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 2012), at the 47th Annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (Poznań, 2014), at the Linguistics Department of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig (2014), and at the international workshop “New Approaches to the Baltic Verb” (Vilnius University, 2018). I thank all participants of these events, especially Martin Haspelmath and Nicole Nau, for their useful feedback, as well as Ksenia Ershova, Ksenia Shagal, Sergejus Tarasovas, Björn Wiemer and four anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the preliminary versions of the text. All faults and shortcomings remain mine.
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