An elusive experiental tense construction in Latvian
Abstract
The article is a contribution to the study of experiential and indefinite past-tense forms. It offers an analysis of the Latvian past-tense construction tikt + PPA, which is now a feature of the Latvian standard language though it was originally restricted to Eastern Latvia (probably mainly the High Latvian dialects). It can be characterised as an experiential but has a wider scope than the prototypical experiential, which refers to event types in the past without precise location in time. The Latvian construction with tikt can also refer to events that are more precisely anchored in time and then develops into a non-resultative and non-narrative past-tense form reminiscent of the factual imperfective in Russian. The question is also raised whether differences can be found between the use of the construction tikt + PPA in texts reflecting its distribution in the regional dialects where it used to be indigenous and in the modern standard language.
Keywords
Latvian; indefinite past tense; experiential; event type; event token; factual imperfective
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St Petersburg University, Department of General Linguistics, Universitetskaya nab. 11, RU-199034, St Petersburg & Vilnius University, Institute for the Languages and Cultures of the Baltic, Universiteto g. 5, LT-01131 Vilnius Russian Federation
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2906-2497
Vilnius University, Institute for the Languages and Cultures of the Baltics, Universiteto g. 5, LT-01131 Vilnius Lithuania
