Early verb inflection in Lithuanian
Paweł Wójcik · 2011
Lithuanian is a highly inflected synthetic language belonging to the Baltic branch of Indo-European languages.The only other living language belonging to this group is Latvian l .Baltic is closely related to Slavic. The Lithuanian verb system'The inflectional system of the Lithuanian verb is based on tense/mood distinctions: There are three moods (Indicative, Conditional, Imperative) and three synthetic tenses (Present, Past, Future 3 ).Verbs are inflected for three persons and two numbers.Nominal/pronominal reference is option al.There is no number distinction in the 3 rd person, and, except for particip\es, no gender distinction in verbs.The markers of categories are fusional endings; in some verbs, tense is additionally marked by means of morphophonemic alternations in the stern.Aspectual distinctions (imperfective vs. perfective and habitual in the Past) are introduced by means of prefixes and suffixes.However, there are no systematic oppositions between perfective and imperfective forms, as there are in the case of the Slavic languages, so that aspect is considered a semi-grammatical category in Lithuanian.Non-finite categories are represented by the Infinitive and a large set of participles (declinable and indeclinable, marked for tense and voice). InflectionIn Lithuanian there are three main conjugations in the Present and two conjugations in the Past tense (for examples of inflectional paradigms see Table Al in the appendix).The Future tense and the marked moods (Imperative, Conditional) are derived from the Infinitive stern.Thus, normally, the three basic forms one has to know in order to construct the whole paradigm are: the Infinitive, the 3 rd person Present and the 3 rd person Past.Traditionally, verbs are assigned to a conjugation class according to their stern suffix.This stern suffix is most transparent in the 3 rd person forms, which consist of bare sterns.In the Present tense, verbs with the stern suffix -a form the I" conjugation, verbs with the stern suffix -i -the 2 nd conjugation, and verbs with -0 -the 3 rd conjugation.The aequisition of Latvian has been studied by Velta Riil}e-DraviQa (see RiiJ.<e-DraviQa, 1982 for referenees).2 Authors 01' contemporary grammars of Lithuanian differ in their opinion as to the number of grammatical catcgories of the verb and to the way cf classifying particular categories.Hefe, an approach similar to that of Paulauskiene, 1979 is taken.For a more detailed deseription ofthe Lithuanian verb system see Ambrazas e.a., 1997.