Verbal categories in Salaca Livonian grammar
Verbal categories in Salaca Livonian grammar

Summary/Abstract: The Latvian territory in the central Baltic region has historically been a core area of the Baltic Sea Sprachbund. Besides the Baltic languages, several Finnic varieties have been spoken in this region. The present study focuses on verbal categories of one variety among them – Salaca Livonian, the only ancient Vidzeme Livonian dialect for which a language corpus is available. In the research history of Finnic languages, Salaca Livonian has often been seen as a mixed variety of Estonian and Livonian. However, it has actually been a mixture of at least three languages – Estonian, Livonian, and Latvian. This paper is an attempt to analyze Salaca Livonian verbal categories according to Estonian and Latvian grammatical traditions. Two main hypotheses are studied. First, it is shown that Salaca Livonian verb forms combine Finnic and Latvian grammatical categories. Secondly, the forms which allow different descriptions indicate weak boundaries or transitions between categories. Salaca Livonian verb morphology unites a number of archaic and innovative features in the making of verb paradigms.

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