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Existential Constructions across Languages: Forms, meanings and functions
Edited by Laure Sarda and Ludovica Lena
[Human Cognitive Processing 76] 2023
► pp. 301–324

Chapter 10
‘To be’ and its negation in Latvian

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A striking peculiarity of the Baltic languages (Old Prussian, Lithuanian, Latvian) is the paradigm of the verb ‘to be’. Whereas Old Prussian, the only documented West Baltic language, still had an Indo-European-looking paradigm, Lithuanian and Latvian, the two members of East Baltic, have developed new forms for ‘to be’ and its negation. Most striking is the situation in Latvian, where the third person is ir ‘he is, they are’ (= Lithuanian yrà), but its negative nav ‘he is not, they are not’. The aim of this paper is to determine the origin of this suppletive relationship.
Keywords: existential verb, copula, negation, suppletion
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Latvian negation
  • 3.Baltic comparison
  • 4.Etymology
  • 5.The Baltic suppletion
  • 6.The nominal sentence
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • List of glosses used in the examples
  • References
Published online: 5 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.76.10pet
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