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Zusammenfassung In Old Lithuanian texts (16-17 century), there are more than a hundred definite forms of adjectives and participles with unshortened pronominal ending -jie in the masculine nominative plural, e. g. baiſuſghie ‘the dreadful (errors)’ or mirßtąghie ‘the dying’ instead of modern Lithuanian forms like gerieji ‘the good’. Stang (1966: 237) supposed a complementary distribution - “-ji stands after -ie-, -jie in the other cases” - and explained the shortening as dissimilation process. However, dissimilation provides a solution only for -ie-ji, whereas in Stang’s framework -jíe with acute intonation should generally have been shortened in polysyllabic forms. It can be shown that the complementary distribution stated by Stang holds true for Old Lithuanian in general. Dissimilation seems to be the best explanation for *-ie-jie > -ie-ji, but it remains uncertain if this process affected other paradigmatic forms as well. It is proposed that definite forms became grammaticalized after monosyllabic forms with íe and úo underwent circumflexion. Only after subsequent univerbation, dissimilation or Leskien’s Law took place.

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Comparison and Gradation in Indo-European: Introduction and Overview1 The Basics "Fundamental to cognitive processing and the structuring of experience is our ability to compare events and register any contrast or discrepancy between them" (Langacker 1987: 101). It is hardly a surprise then that all known human languages have ways to express comparisons. What makes comparison such a rewarding topic for typological studies is the fact that it can be expressed by various means ranging from pragmatics to fully grammaticalized constructions.The most frequent and possibly most fundamental type of comparison (see Jäger 2018: 433 with fns. 424, 425, 434) is one in which the listener/reader is invited to conceptualize one entity in terms of another entity. Typically, the two entities compared belong to fundamentally different ontological categories:(1)John is like a lion.Comparisons of this type are holistic: While the most salient properties relevant for the comparison may be made explicit or may be inferred from the context, they always evoke the whole concept of the comparandum. Thus, a discourse like the following is felicitous:(2) A: John won the heavyweight championships. B: Yes, he is like a lion. A: He hasn't got a mane, though.Comparative constructions like the one in (1) are called similatives. They will be discussed in greater detail in section 2.Other types of comparison aim at specific properties pertaining to the compared individuals. They involve what Langacker (1987: 104) calls 'selection' and some type of gradation relative to the selected property. Gradation is the notion of explicitly assigning an entity a position relative to some other contextually relevant value(s) on a predicative scale. Gradation is thus always extent-based (Seuren 1973, von Stechow 1984, Kennedy 2001, Beck 2011. For example, (3) explicitly assigns Peter a value on the scale of body size that is closer to 'tall' than to 'small'.