Some aspects of the history of the Baltic imperative
ENThe article deals with developments in the paradigms of the Latvian and Lithuanian imperative. In his monumental “Latvian Grammar,” Endzelīns gives an overview of the diachrony of Latvian and Baltic imperatives with a wealth of dialectal and historical data, but a few aspects remain insufficiently investigated. Old Latvian and Old Lithuanian had richer imperatival paradigms than the contemporary languages, with 1sg imperatives and exclusive 1pl imperatives expressing requests for permission (OLatv. lai es eemu ‘let me go,’ laid mehs eetam ‘let us go’ in Glück’s Bible, Old Lith. t-eymi, te-pereyname in the Chyliński Bible). Old Lithuanian kept inclusive and exclusive 1pl imperatives strictly apart (eikime ‘let’s go,’ but teiname, tegul einame ‘allow us to go’); the contemporary language has retained only inclusive 1pl imperatives. In Old Latvian 1pl imperatives with lai could be both exclusive and inclusive (lai eetam 1. ‘let’s go,’ 2. ‘allow us to go’). The modern Latvian 1pl imperative with lai (lai dziedam), now archaic or poetic, has retained only the inclusive function, but (as shown by a comparison with Lithuanian and other languages) it must have been originally exclusive. This is evidenced by its dual inclusive and exclusive use as late as the second half of the 18th century. Exclusive first-person imperatives have now gone out of use in both languages; when this happened still has to be established. Certain derived functions of 1sg and 1pl imperatives have survived in Latvian — e.g., in deontic questions like ko lai es saku ‘what am I to say’ — and in other modal functions that cannot be found in Old Latvian texts and have never developed in Lithuanian. The article further discusses questions pertaining to the structure of the imperatival paradigm as well as to patterns of markedness in imperatival forms. Keywords: imperative, semantic map, paradigm structure.
