Notes on the Lithuanian restrictive
Abstract
This paper focuses on the previously barely described restrictive use of the prefix te- in Lithuanian. This prefix, whose meaning is similar to that of the particle tik ‘only’, is peculiar in that it can take scope over almost any kind of phrases, including constituents of non-finite embedded clauses. In this paper, morphosyntactic properties and scope of the restrictive te- are analysed on the basis of both elicited and corpus data. Besides that, it is shown that from a cross-linguistic point of view, a restrictive affix displaying both rigid verb-adjacency and scope flexibility is quite rare.
Keywords
restrictive markers; scope; prefixation; focus; Lithuanian
Supporting Agencies
Russian Science Support Foundation, Section of History and Philology of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Slavic Studies, Leninskij prospekt 32-A, RU-119334 Moscow Russian Federation
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4503-2634
