Verbal modifiers in areal perspective : The case of Latvian Romani

Publisher Copyright: © 2022, Vilnius University. All rights reserved.Based on the analysis of the texts collected in the 1930s in Latvia and Estonia, this paper provides a description of the semantics of the verbal modifiers, i.e., prefixes (preverbs) and particles, in Latvian Romani. The system of verbal modifiers in Latvian Romani is an innovation evolved under Slavic and Baltic influence. Most preverbs are instances of MAT-borrowing from Slavic and Baltic, whereas verb particles are a PAT-borrowing, modelled after the Latvian system. The paper argues that even preverbs of Slavic origin often copy the semantics and derivational patterns of Latvian prefixed verbs. It is also shown that, differently from Latvian, in Romani both preverbs and verb particles can affect the verb’s argument structure (e.g., by making it transitive) and change its aspectual value (e.g., by making it perfective). Finally, the distribution of verbal modifiers in Latvian Romani (the development of verb particles as opposed to other closely related Northeastern Romani dialects which only have prefixes, and higher frequency of verb particles in Estonia than in Latvia) confirms the areal cline in the spread of verb particles.Peer reviewe

A token-based investigation of verbal plurality in Lithuanian dialects

This paper examines the use of the verbal suffixes -(d)inė- and ‑dav‑ in Lithuanian dialects. Both suffixes express pluractionality, although of different types, and their distribution in Lithuanian dialects differs as well. Using corpus data, we find that in South Aukštaitian ‑dav‑ is rarer and -(d)inė‑ is more frequent than in East Aukštaitian; in Lithuanian dialects of Belarus -dav- is almost absent. We argue against the assumption that -(d)inėforms have extended into the domain of the past habitual at the expense of ‑dav‑ forms; a slightly higher token frequency of -(d)inė‑ in South Aukštaitian seems to apply irrespective of any particular tense. We also argue that only token-based analyses can substantiate claims concerning areal distribution of certain grammatical forms and constructions

Towards the Corpus of Latvian Romani Texts : Deciphering the Manuscripts in Jānis Leimanis' Archive

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)Latvian Romani is a Northeastern Romani dialect with a limited number of publicly available sources. Two large archival collections of texts in Latvian Romani, compiled primarily in the 1930s in Latvia and Estonia, have been recently digitized as images and made available online for a wider public. In our study, we focus on one of these collections, the Latvian Romani folklore texts collected by Jānis Leimanis in interwar Latvia. In this paper, we describe how initial manual transcriptions, most of which have been created with the help of a special crowdsourcing platform, were integrated in the handwritten text recognition (HTR) workflow in Transkribus. We present two HTR models trained on the basis of Leimanis' collection and discuss various issues related to the work on these texts.Peer reviewe

Аналитическое будущее время в языке русских цыган как калька с восточнославянских языков

This paper discusses the development of the analytic future in Russian Romani. In this Romani dialect, an analytic future tense can be expressed by means of the two auxiliary verbs avéla ‘to come’ and léla ‘to take.’ This article argues that the development of this analytic future was induced by contact with Eastern Slavic languages. In Romani, the verb avéla also functions as the future form of the copula, thus its use as an auxiliary to derive future tense is a calque from the Slavic construction with the verb budu ‘I will.’ In the article it is argued that the use of the verb léla as an auxiliary is a “fossilized” calque from Old Russian, in which the verb jati ‘to take’ was, up to the 16th century, one of the main ways to derive the future tense. It is also shown that there is no clear semantic distinction between the two constructions, and that preference is given to one or the other depending on the areal variety or even idiolect. Finally, Soviet Romani literature offers interesting cases that demonstrate when the verb léla begins to function as a future tense copula.В статье обсуждается развитие аналитического будущего времени в языке русских цыган. В этом диалекте цыганского языка существует особый способ для выражения будущего времени с помощью вспомогательных глаголов авэ́ла ‘приходить’ и лэ́ла ‘брать, взять’. Развитие этих аналитических конструкций связывается с влиянием восточнославянских языков. В цыганском языке глагол авэ́ла также используется как будущее время глагола-связки ‘быть’, поэтому его употребление в качестве вспомогательного глагола для образования будущего можно трактовать как кальку со славянских конструкций с глаголом буду. В статье доказывается, что использование вспомогательного глагола лэ́ла является “окаменевшей” калькой со старорусского, в котором глагол яти вплоть до XVI в. оставался одним из главных способов для образования будущего времени. Также показывается, что нет четкого семантического различия между этими двумя конструкциями, предпочтение отдаётся одной из них в зависимости от говора или идиолекта. Наконец, советская литература на цыганском языке содержит интересные примеры, иллюстрирующие то, как глагол лэ́ла начинает функционировать как будущее время глагола-связки

Finite to non-finite through impersonalization: the emergence of an infinitive in Russian Romani

The dataset and R code for an article on the developement of a new infitival form in Russian Romani under Russian influence

Analytic Future Tense in Russian Romani as a Calque from Eastern Slavic

This paper discusses the development of the analytic future in Russian Romani. In this Romani dialect, an analytic future tense can be expressed by means of the two auxiliary verbs avéla ‘to come’ and léla ‘to take.’ This article argues that the development of this analytic future was induced by contact with Eastern Slavic languages. In Romani, the verb avéla also functions as the future form of the copula, thus its use as an auxiliary to derive future tense is a calque from the Slavic construction with the verb budu ‘I will.’ In the article it is argued that the use of the verb léla as an auxiliary is a “fossilized” calque from Old Russian, in which the verb jati ‘to take’ was, up to the 16th century, one of the main ways to derive the future tense. It is also shown that there is no clear semantic distinction between the two constructions, and that preference is given to one or the other depending on the areal variety or even idiolect. Finally, Soviet Romani literature offers interesting cases that demonstrate when the verb léla begins to function as a future tense copula

Verbal modifiers in areal perspective : The case of Latvian Romani

Publisher Copyright: © 2022, Vilnius University. All rights reserved.Based on the analysis of the texts collected in the 1930s in Latvia and Estonia, this paper provides a description of the semantics of the verbal modifiers, i.e., prefixes (preverbs) and particles, in Latvian Romani. The system of verbal modifiers in Latvian Romani is an innovation evolved under Slavic and Baltic influence. Most preverbs are instances of MAT-borrowing from Slavic and Baltic, whereas verb particles are a PAT-borrowing, modelled after the Latvian system. The paper argues that even preverbs of Slavic origin often copy the semantics and derivational patterns of Latvian prefixed verbs. It is also shown that, differently from Latvian, in Romani both preverbs and verb particles can affect the verb’s argument structure (e.g., by making it transitive) and change its aspectual value (e.g., by making it perfective). Finally, the distribution of verbal modifiers in Latvian Romani (the development of verb particles as opposed to other closely related Northeastern Romani dialects which only have prefixes, and higher frequency of verb particles in Estonia than in Latvia) confirms the areal cline in the spread of verb particles.Peer reviewe

(Non-)agreement of passive participles in South-Eastern Lithuanian

The phenomenon of non-agreement of passive participles (mostly t-participles) is discussed on the basis of the TriMCo corpus of South-Eastern Lithuanian dialects. A quantitative analysis of the examples shows that non-agreeing t-participles appear significantly more often in East Aukštaitian than in South Aukštaitian. It is also shown that plural subjects and position of the participle before the subject increase the probability of the non-agreeing form. At the same time we show that (non-)agreement of passive constructions in South-Eastern Lithuanian dialects does not correlate with the semantic type of passive. We also argue that the Lithuanian dialectal constructions with non-agreeing passive participles are most probably not related to the similar constructions in East Slavic (either areally, or diachronically). The non-agreeing passive constructions are also not areally related to non-agreeing active participle constructions, but probably illustrate the same tendency for the lack of agreement with plural subjects