| Abstract [eng] |
Lithuanian and Finnish both have alternations in object marking involving the notion of partitivity. In Finnish, the case of the direct object of transitive verbs alternates between the accusative (ACC) and the partitive (PAR). PAR is the default case for the object of a transitive verb and a special feature is required for the assignment of the ACC. In Lithuanian, the case of the direct object of transitive verbs alternates between the ACC and the partitive genitive (GP). Some functions of the Finnish PAR and the Lithuanian GP in object marking are identical (i.e. partial affectedness of mass nouns), but some are markedly different. This dissertation offers an overview of the factors that have been invoked in the literature as affecting the use of PAR cases, and also a comparison of their relevance and relative ranking in Finnish and Lithuanian. The dissertation also discusses Lithuanian GP with discrete nouns and offers an overview of possible conditions for the use of GP in resultative constructions in modern and older Lithuanian in comparison with their counterparts in Finnish and Slavic. A corpus-based study was performed in order to analyse the grammatical and semantic constraints of the use of Finnish PAR and Lithuanian GP. The research presented in this dissertation is data-driven, both qualitative and quantitative. A separate study is carried out on a wide dataset, which is then treated with an ID3 algorithm so that decision trees can be produced. The dissertation contains in all more than 200 examples mainly from Finnish and Lithuanian, but also from other languages. |
