Minor grams in Baltic: an introduction
ENEven though ‘minor gram’ is not an established notion in linguistics, and presumably will not become one, a glance at the list of contents of this volume will bring more clarity as to what is meant. The studies brought together here deal with phenomena that are usually absent from reference grammars because these often concentrate on the ‘major grammatical categories’ that participate in a system of correlations pervading the whole verbal or nominal domain, like tense, aspect, and mood, or number, case, and gender. For these categories it is easy to find a place in the conjugation and declension tables that (we often imagine) give us an idea of the grammatical structure of the language. Several types of arguably strongly or weakly grammaticalised units do not fit into the tables, either because they do not run through the whole grammatical system but function within a specific subdomain of it, or because they are in some way idiomatic and non-compositional, and the authors of grammars have been hesitant about including them in their descriptions, often relegating them to a footnote or to a small-print addendum to a section about some major category. [...]. [Extract, p. 7]
- Lithuanian grammar / Vytautas Ambrazas, Emma Geniušienė, Aleksas Girdenis, Nijolė Sližienė, Dalija Tekorienė, Adelė Valeckienė, Elena Valiulytė. Vilnius : Baltos lankos, 2006. 802 p.
- On the aspectual uses of the prefix be- in Lithuanian / Peter M. Arkadiev. Baltic linguistics. 2011, 2, p. 37-78.
