The Database of New Borrowings into Lithuanian lists 129 verbs which were either directly borrowed or derived from the borrowed nominal and adjectival stems. In terms of morphosyntactic adaptation, two suffixes, viz. uo ti and in ti, are used as indirect insertion strategy devices (Wohlgemuth 2009: 94 ff.). The suffix uo ti is the most productive verbalizer in modern Lithuanian and is predominantly used to integrate the so called internationalisms in the standard language, while in ti is the main factitive/causative affix and is employed in the non standard language domain to accommodate the verbal borrowings coming mostly from English. In very many cases, verbs, nouns and some adjectives sharing the same stem were borrowed and I argue that a synchronic derivational link between them can be recognized in Lithuanian, no matter what the derivational history of these words in the donor language was. If a borrowed verb has a suffix, but no corresponding noun or adjective is found in the current usage, the suffix can be interpreted as a device of morpho-syntactic adaptation only. Compared to uo ti and in ti, other suffixes are only rarely attested in the database, but they clearly reflect productive types of verb formation, namely, the denominal similatives in au ti and the deadjectival inchoatives in ė ti. The data on prefixal and reflexive derivatives is too scarce to note any definite trends. As far as inflectional productivity is concerned, in ti and uo ti definitely play a major role in enriching the classes characterized by the present stem affixes of the a-type and the past stems affixes of the o-type. The inflexion of verbs in uo ti is also affected by morpho-phonological alternation of the suffix to resolve hiatus, viz. the infinitive stem has /uo/ (no hiatus), the present stem is augmented by the palatal glide /j/ ( uoj ), while in the past stem, /uo/ is replaced by /av/ (i.e. uo ti, uoj a, av o).
In this paper we examine transitivity pairs in the two modern Baltic languages Lithuanian and Latvian and compare them to neighbouring Finnic (Finnish, Estonian) and Slavic (Russian, Polish) languages. In Slavic the main strategy is to derive the intransitive (noncausal) verb from the transitive (causal) verb, while in Finnic we find a high number of derived causatives. Baltic uses both techniques, and in addition, there is a higher number of pairs where either both verbs are marked, or two etymologically related verbs are underived from a synchronic point of view. Differences and similarities across the six languages are investigated, using a list of 20 notions divided into five groups. Special attention is paid to animacy and to the distinction between inchoative and durative noncausal verbs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.