The paper discusses the Latvian debitive from the viewpoint of modality and syntactic structure. In typological linguistics the system of moods in Latvian and in particular the Latvian debitive as a unique linguistic form has been rarely described. The debitive is a mood expressing meaning of necessity or obligation in Latvian. Therefore the introductory part of the paper offers a brief description of the mood system in Latvian explaining the functions of the debitive, its morphosyntax, and its modal semantics. The paper does not discuss exhaustively all the properties of the debitive and thus should be viewed as an initial discussion of this under-investigated subject matter. It proposes an overview of the forms of the debitive as well as a description of its modal meanings and distribution. Further research should involve a more detailed description of modal meanings as well as the distribution of the debitive and its seeming likeness to impersonal and passive constructions.

“Latvian Grammar” was written to make information about the Latvian language and its grammatical system more easily available not only within Latvia, but also beyond its borders. A modern grammar of Latvian written in English is as important for native speakers of Latvian as for those who have learned Latvian as a second language and also is of great value for anyone interested in the culture and history of Latvia or the Latvian language itself. The need for a reference grammar of Latvian written in English is especially important right now due to the existence of a large Latvian diaspora community abroad, particularly in English-speaking countries where children and young people are educated in the language of their home countries rather than in Latvian. A Latvian grammar written in English will also be useful for those who are learning Latvian as a foreign language and wish to learn more about its grammatical system and unique features. Likewise, “Latvian grammar” will be a useful reference and source for examples for teachers of Latvian – both those who teach it to speakers as a school or university subject and those who teach it as a foreign language. There is also considerable demand among linguists abroad for a systematic and dependable description of Latvian written by native speakers of Latvian. Latvian is a rather unique combination of ancient as well as relatively new features, which are of interest to researchers abroad and are important for the typological, cognitive, pragmatic, functional, and contrastive analysis of language.

[full article and abstract in English] The goal of this article is to analyse the alternation between the genitive and nominative cases in Latvian. As the alternation between genitive and nominative cases is possible in all clauses in which the verb būt ‘to be’ is used as an independent verb, this article examines existential, locative, and also possessive clauses, while also demonstrating that distinguishing these clause types is problematic for Latvian utilising the criteria given in the linguistic literature. Clauses containing the negative form of būt ‘to be’, i.e. nebūt, form the foundation of those selected for this study, as only in these sentences the genitive/nominative alternation can be seen for the subject in Latvian. There are only fragmentary descriptions of existential clauses as a unique semantic type, primarily in connection with the function of the verb būt ‘to be’ and the problems associated with distinguishing its independent and auxiliary meanings. Word order in existential, locative, and possessive clauses has, until now, been examined in connection with typical clause expanders – adverbial modifiers and the dative of possession as well as the information structure of the clause. At the same time, case choice for objects in negative existential clauses has traditionally been one of the most studied themes regarding language standardisation. In order to determine which factors affect the choice of either the genitive or nominative case, a corpus study was done analysing 979 examples: 882 with a genitive subject and 97 with a nominative subject. It was found that a connection exists between the definiteness of the subject, word order, and case choice; however, this manifests only as a tendency rather than as a strict rule.

The article takes a closer look at the partitive genitive constructions in Latvian, their structure, semantics, and syntactic functions. With the help of a corpus analysis, an attempt has been made to find out what determines gender and number agreement variations between the partitive genitive constructions in subject position and the predicate, if it comprises a declinable participle. Attention was paid to such features as subject animacy, voice of the predicate, word order (SV / VS), quantifier lexeme and grammatical number of the genitive. 320 examples with partitive genitive constructions were selected from The Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian LVK2018, including such quantifier lexemes as daļa ‘part’, skaits ‘number’, vairums ‘quantity’, vairākums ‘majority’, puse ‘half’, daudzums ‘amount / quantity’, lērums ‘bagful’, simts ‘hundred’, tūkstotis ‘thousand’, daudz ‘much/many’, maz ‘little / few’. The best results are given by the combination of values ‘animate’, ‘active’ and ‘SV’, in which 93.24% of the examples are partitive genitive agreement. Data analyzed so far suggest that quantifiers involving the semantic element of partitivity (e.g., daļa ‘part’) favor partitive genitive agreement, whereas quantifiers lacking this semantic element favor quantifier agreement. This is an exploratory quantitative study on agreement tendencies in Latvian.

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