This article outlines the aims, methodological approaches and research topics of the thematic volume Studies in the TAME Domain in Baltic and Its Neighbours. It also briefly characterises the individual contributions to the volume, highlightingtheir main ideas and pointing out their relevance to ongoing discussions as well as the impulses they can give to further (also cross-linguistic) research. The grammatical domains explored in the volume are tense, aspect, mood andevidentiality/mirativity.
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.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the semantic values of the Lithuanian perfect construction, putting them into a perspective of grammaticalization. The paper is based entirely on the data from a 2-million-word Facebook comments corpus created ad hoc for this study. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the semantic values of the perfect tokens extracted from the corpus reveals several previously unidentified features of this Lithuanian construction. A large proportion of structures formally corresponding to the perfect should be described as copular constructions with adjectivized participles. This formal coincidence and the ambiguity generated by it in certain cases should not be seen as accidental but rather considered a likely source of the grammaticalization of the Lithuanian perfect, as the influence of its semantic features can be seen in all the perfect’s other values. Considering it as a source, it seems that the development of the Lithuanian perfect is going in two separate, but also related directions, each of which is based on a gradual abandonment of one of the two core features of the prototypical Lithuanian perfects―the subject-oriented resultatives. In the case of the transitive resultative perfects, the orientation towards the subject is lost, while in the case of the experientials, it is the resultative meaning that is lost. Of these two values, the experientials are twice as frequent, which shows that the resultative meaning is abandoned more readily than the need to express a state or a quality of the subject. However, the experiential perfects seem to present some formal differences from all the other perfect values, namely, a significantly more frequent auxiliary usage which has so far been considered accidental.
This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the functions of the present, past and future perfect forms in standard Latvian and Lithuanian based on two complementary types of data: the typological questionnaire devised for the study of the perfect for the EUROTYP project and the Lithuanian-Latvian parallel corpus. We analyse the data qualitatively as well as quantitatively and demonstrate that the two Baltic languages show both similarities and important differences in their perfect grams. While the Present Perfect in Latvian clearly shows a higher degree of grammaticalisation than in Lithuanian, manifested in the frequency of use, obligatoriness and functional extent, the differences betweenthe two languages in the uses of the other tenses of the perfect are more intricate and largely pertain to the expression of modal and discourse-oriented functions.
This article is a study in the use of irrealis in complementation in the two Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Latvian, and in two Fennic languages, Estonian and Finnish. Four domains of complementation are singled out: propositional, desiderative, apprehensional and evaluative. All investigated languages show limited use of irrealis in the propositional domain (in identical conditions, viz. under main clause negation), as well as in the apprehensional and evaluative domains. The most important differences are observed in the state-of-affairs domain, in particular with desiderative predicates, where Lithuanian shows consistent irrealis marking whereas Finnish has mostly realis. Estonian and Latvian are intermediate. Estonian has a rather strong predominance of irrealis, but it might be recent; in Latvian realis and irrealis are about equally distributed, but this situation seems to differ from that in Old Latvian. In these two languages changes seem therefore to have been going on, and areal convergence might to some extent have been involved in this.
