| Abstract [eng] |
The present research focuses on the Lithuanian modal verbs gauti ‘get’, tekti ‘be gotten’ and reik(ė)ti ‘need’. The purpose of the research is to analyse the verbs gauti ‘get’, tekti ‘be gotten’ and reik(ė)ti ‘need’ within the framework of grammaticalization and to identify what aspects of grammaticalization are relevant (if at all) to the verbs under study. The study also aims at exploring the factors that trigger the rise of modal meanings and at comparing the semantic properties of the verbs gauti ‘get’, tekti ‘be gotten’ and reik(ė)ti ‘need’ in contemporary Lithuanian and in Old Lithuanian writings (the 16th and 17th centuries). The data of the contemporary Lithuanian language has been compiled from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language, namely its Central newspapers and Fiction parts. The examples of Old Lithuanian have been extracted from three Old Lithuanian Writings: “Postilė” by J. Bretkūnas (1591), “Postilė” by M. Daukša (1599), and “Punktai Sakymų” by K. Sirvydas (1629; 1644). The corpus-based study has shown that the verbs under analysis satisfy the parameters of frequency and polifunctionality. However, they do not exhibit any morphological or morphosyntactic properties that set them apart from the other lexical verbs. In Old Lithuanian Writings the verb reik(ė)ti ‘need’ is used as a modal verb while the verbs gauti ‘get’ and tekti ‘be gotten’ are rarely used in their modal meanings. In contemporary Lithuanian, reik(ė)ti ‘need’ and tekti ‘be gotten’ function as modal verbs while gauti ‘get’ is on the periphery of the Lithuanian modal system. |
