Der Nominativ in Zeitadverbialen im Litauischen
The nominative in temporal adverbials in Lithuanian

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the nominative in temporal adverbials (mainly durative) in Lithuanian. On the basis of an analysis of a text corpus it was established that certain lexemes show a strong tendency to appear in the nominative in adverbial function. Other constructions involving temporal adverbials in the nominative tend to become fixed expressions. We argue that the so-called nominative object could have played, or still plays, a part in generally supporting the use of temporal and spatial adverbials in the nominative case. When describing the occurrence of the nominative in adverbial function at a synchronic level, it can be said that (a) it occurs mostly with quantifying modifiers before the noun and (b) it describes a time space from some fixed (sometimes unfixed) point in the past up to reference time or, in the case of the present, up to speech time (as in English he has been singing for three hours).

• Details
• Contents