Axel Holvoet

Contemporary Approaches to Baltic Linguistics

Baltic languages have only marginally featured in the discourse of theoretical linguistics and linguistic typology. The book aims to reconnect Baltic linguistics and the current agenda of the theoretical and typological study of language. The book is intended for a broad linguistic audience, including typologists and theoretical linguists.

Interpretive deontics: A definition and a semantic map based mainly on Slavonic and Baltic data

This article introduces the notion of interpretive deontics, i.e. deontic expressions used interpretively (in the sense of Sperber and Wilson 1986). It is argued that languages may develop grammaticalized or semi-grammaticalized means to refer to other peoples acts of volition (typically, but not only, demands put on the speaker). This gram type, here illustrated from Slavonic and Baltic, encompasses different usage types ranging from requests for permission and deontic requests to negative assessments of other peoples acts of volition and even other peoples assumptions (an extension into the epistemic domain eventually leading to evidential use of originally deontic expressions). The authors also propose a semantic map, showing typical types of input, meaning shifts within the interpretive deontic domain and further developments beyond this domain into epistemic and evidential meaning.

Between morphosyntax and the paradigm: Some puzzling patterns of case distribution in Baltic and their implications

This article deals with some questions of case morphology in Baltic and their theoretical implications. The Latvian instrumental, which has coalesced with the accusative in the singular and the dative in the plural, causes notorious problems: although facts of prepositional government (the rise of differentiated prepositional government along the number opposition) show that the instrumental has effectively ceased to exist, the accusative singular and dative plural forms arising from it continue, albeit to a limited extent, to perform their former functions. Similar facts are adduced from Old Lithuanian, in which some local cases have entered a complementary distribution along the animacy vs inanimacy opposition without coalescing. It is well known that, diachronically, distributional patterns in the paradigm reflect morphosyntactic rules, but it is argued here that this may hold synchronically as well. Such facts as adduced here from Baltic cannot be explained at a purely morphological level within a paradigm-based approach, and in some instances distributional patterns in case paradigms must be allowed to be regulated by morphosyntax. This creates problems for the autonomy of morphology, and for the distinction between “syntactic” and “morphological” case.

Sources for historical imperatives

Abstract The article deals with historical (narrative, descriptive, dramatic) imperatives, an imperative replacing a past tense form in referring to unexpected events or in vivid narration. As their association with the basic directive function of imperatives is not clear, attempts have been made to derive them from some abstract general meanings of imperatives (presumably underlying also their directive meaning). There has been, however, no research into the source constructions for historical imperatives. In this article I point out two types of sources: stylistic devices such as inner monologue and apostrophe on the one hand, and mirative imperatives (of different origin) on the other. As mirative imperatives may be put to use to state the occurrence of unexpected events, the two types of sources coalesce into a common though diffuse construction type comprising historical and mirative imperatives, whose basic function is to describe unexpected events, though languages differ as to the extent to which they use these forms as a narrative device.