Mood and modality in Baltic

ENThe present volume gives an overview of the mood systems and the expression of modality in both living Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Latvian (Old Prussian is ignored as the poor quality of the texts in this language precludes reliable conclusions concerning its grammar). The aim of the book was not so much to make a fundamental contribution to the theory of mood and modality as to provide a partial remedy for the unsatisfactory situation in the grammatical description of the Baltic languages. The grammatical facts of these languages are not sufficiently accessible to general linguistics and language typology because descriptions are few and such as are available are usually theoretically obsolete, diachronically biased and incomplete. Some of the reproaches formulated here, especially that of incompleteness, will no doubt adhere to the present work as well. Though the author has made ample use of Internet search engines, he offers no corpus-based results concerning relative frequencies of grammatical forms and modal expressions, tendencies in their use etc. The chapters of this book cannot aspire to give an exhaustive picture of the domain of mood and modality in Baltic; rather, they reflect what the author has thought theoretically or typologically significant and interesting. This accounts for certain phenomena of statistically marginal importance being discussed in detail while many tendencies in contemporary Lithuanian and Latvian usage may have remained unobserved. The author hopes, however, to have brought to the fore a considerable number of questions hitherto ignored or misrepresented in the literature, thereby clearing the path for further work.