Peter Arkadiev

Notes on the Lithuanian Restrictive

This paper focuses on the previously barely described restrictive use of the prefix te- in Lithuanian. This prefix, whose meaning is similar to that of the particle tik ‘only’, is peculiar in that it can take scope over almost any kind of phrases, including constituents of non-finite embedded clauses. In this paper, morphosyntactic properties and scope of the restrictive te- are analysed on the basis of both elicited and corpus data. Besides that, it is shown that from a cross-linguistic point of view, a restrictive affix displaying both rigid verb-adjacency and scope flexibility is quite rare.

Keywords: restrictive markers, scope, prefixation, focus