Why byloti dievop ‘speak to God’, but prašyti dieviep ‘ask God’?

The Allative and the Adessive with verbs of speaking in Old Lithuanian


Abstract

The paper aims to investigate the historical usage of two local cases, namely the Allative and the Adessive, governed by verba dicendi in Old Lithuanian. In Mikalojus Daukša’s Postil (1599) the Allative occurs with verbs of address and denotes the Addressee as a Goal of a verbal act. The Adessive, however, is governed by predicates of request and conveys the Source of a desired item. To verify whether this is part of Daukša’s idiolect or a general feature of Lithuanian at the beginning of its written period, the data from DP are compared to the texts of two other varieties of written Lithuanian of the 16th–17th century: Jonas Bretkūnas’ Postil (1591) and Konstantinas Sirvydas’ Punktay sakimu (two parts, 1629 and 1644). In order to explain the motivation for this usage, dialectal and typological data are used.

 

Keywords

local cases; Allative; Adessive; verbs of speaking; Old Lithuanian

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Published : 2016-12-31


Žilinskaitė-Šinkūnienė, E. (2016). Why byloti dievop ‘speak to God’, but prašyti dieviep ‘ask God’?. Baltic Linguistics, 7, 137-173. https://doi.org/10.32798/bl.385

Eglė Žilinskaitė-Šinkūnienė  egle.zilinskaite@flf.vu.lt
Vilnius University, Faculty of Philology, Department of Baltic Linguistics, Universiteto g. 5, LT-01131 Vilnius  Lithuania