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Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun, Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari
[Studies in Language Companion Series 197] 2018
► pp. 239–260

Chapter 11
Non-finiteness, complementation and evidentiality

The Lithuanian Accusativus cum Participio in a cross-linguistic perspective

| Vilnius University
| University of Manchester

The relatedness of non-finite constructions and evidentiality has been observed in various European languages. Passive matrix verbs plus infinitive in English, the corresponding though less productive pattern in Dutch, reportive passives in Danish, and evidential participial constructions in Lithuanian have all received attention in the literature. We continue this line of investigation, focussing on the Accusativus cum Participio, found in contemporary Lithuanian only with verbs of communication, cognition and perception. Our quantitative and qualitative corpus-based analysis investigates its distribution in different types of discourse and provides evidence to support the claim that the use of the non-agreeing ‘be’-participle is obligatory because it marks a proposition. We compare our account with similar uses of non-finite verb in other languages.

Keywords: Lithuanian, accusative plus participle, proposition, finiteness, Latin
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and method
  • 3.Types of participles and the AcP construction
  • 4.Results and discussion
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgement
  • List of abbreviations
  • Notes
  • Data sources
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.197.11uso
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Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language – [URL]
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