Bērtin berot valodiņu 'Our language flows like a river': On another Latvian reduplicative verbal construction from the perspective of corpus linguistics
Abstract
In our paper we describe a specific, Latvian two-word construction consisting of a verb preceded by an adverb derived from the same verb by the suffix -us-/-šus- (e.g., bēgšus bēgt 'run for one's life'). We are interested in how a given language element, apparently archaic and typical of Latvian folk songs (dainas), is used in today's language.
We search for the construction in the available Latvian corpora (chiefly LVK2018, lvTenTen14 and InterCorp lv v13) and compare the resulting occurrences with a description in the current Latvian linguistic sources: both grammars and dictionaries. Deviations from the norm are treated descriptively in this article, as the speakers' aim is to achieve a communication goal rather than their mistakes, as well as the creative development of this construction up to the present.
The article is supplemented with an appendix: alphabetic lists of analysed lemmas along with their frequency and the fragment from the database of reduplicative constructions.