The Lithuanian passive perfect and its history

Abstract

The aim of the article is to establish the existence and structure of the passive perfect in Lithuanian. This language has a periphrastic active perfect, but its passive counterpart, consisting of ‘be’ and a past passive participle, is not completely severed from its grammaticalisation source, the object resultative. Experiential uses are attested, which suggests that the resultative has to some extent become a perfect, but it is not clear to what extent the two can be teased apart. On the other hand, the experiential passive perfect has dedicated marking of its own as well, though it is not frequent. The Lithuanian passive perfect is thus a rather diffuse and weakly entrenched gram. The failure of the language to develop a clearly defined passive perfect can probably be explained formally and functionally by the overall low degree of grammaticalisation of the perfect (including the active perfect) in Lithuanian.