Studies in Baltic and Indo-European linguistics: In honor of William R. Schmalstieg (review)

This volume, a festschrift in honor of professor emeritus William R. Schmalstieg, consists of articles submitted by twenty-nine scholars of Baltic and Indo-European linguistics at the invitation of its coeditors, Philip Baldi and Pietro U. Dini. Written in English and averaging ten pages in length, the articles have been arranged according to the alphabetical order of the contributors’ surnames. The volume opens with a biography of Professor Schmalstieg (xi–xxi) and a chronological list of his publications (xxiii–xlvi); it concludes with an index of authors (291–96) and an index of subjects (297–302). Below I provide a summary of a representative cross-section of the articles included in this collection.

In the volume’s first article, ‘On the genitive with neuter participles and verbal nouns in Lithuanian’ (1–6), Vytautas Ambrazas takes issue with Schmalstieg’s hypothesis regarding the Lithuanian use of the genitive case to express the agent of actions denoted by neuter participles and verbal nouns. According to this hypothesis, the genitive-case agent in such constructions can be traced to an ergative case owing to the putative development of Indo-European accusative sentences from original split-ergative ones. Ambrazas concludes, in contrast, that Lithuanian agentive genitives in such constructions ‘do not exclude a common origin of genitive constructions with intransitive and transitive neuter participles’ and can be adequately explained ‘within the framework of the accusative sentence type’ (5).

In ‘“To be” or “not to be” in the Indo-European languages’ (7–18), Xaverio Ballester considers the expression of copulas that are functionally analogous to English be in a variety of genetically unrelated languages. He maintains that ‘[a]lmost all of the hypothetical data support the hypothesis that a demonstrative could be the origin of the Proto-Indo-European proper “be”’ (14).

In his contribution ‘On the marking of predicate nominals in Baltic’ (75–90), Axel Holvoet counters the traditional view of the predicative instrumental as an innovation in Indo-European that is shared in common by Baltic and Slavic. Citing frequently ignored features of Latvian, Holvoet notes that Latvian lost the instrumental case, its formal expression having coalesced with the accusative in the singular and with the dative in the plural. Functionally, however, the Latvian instrumental was supplanted by the preposition par + accusative, so that the Latvian predicates of copulas in their nonfinite form can either agree in case with an underlying (e.g. dative-case) subject or be expressed by par + accusative (cf. Patīkami ir būt rakstniekam vs. Patīkami ir būt par rakstnieku ‘it is pleasant to be a writer’). To this Lithuanian responds only with an instrumental ‘default’ predicate: Malonu būti rašytoju ‘idem’ (76–77). Holvoet further notes that in Lithuanian, substantives and adjectives occurring as predicate nominals behave differently from each other in terms of case marking; accordingly, the expansion of the Lithuanian instrumental case that is often attributed to Slavic influence has actually occurred among substantival predicates rather than among adjectival ones.

Giedrius Subačius’s article ‘Double orthography in American Lithuanian newspapers at the turn of the twentieth century’ (189–201) details the switch in Lithuanian orthography from the Polish-influenced digraphs sz and cz to the Czech-like graphs š and č (i.e. the letters s and c superimposed with a háček or ‘caron’), which represent Lithuanian’s voiceless palatal continuant and voiceless palatal affricate, respectively. Subacius concludes that it took approximately seventeen years—from 1890 to 1907—for all Lithuanian-language newspapers in the United States to switch definitively and exclusively to the new orthography. Curiously, he ignores the doubtless simultaneous change in the spelling of the voiced palatal continuant, from the Polish-style ż to the Czech-style ž.

Many other articles in this collection deal...