Verbs pietikt ‘suffice’, trūkt ‘lack’ and the case of subject in affirmation and negation

Abstract

In modern Latvian, genitive and nominative competition can be observed in the subject position of the sentence. The third-person verbs pietikt ‘suffice’ and trūkt ‘lack’ have the subject of the sentence in the genitive case, but in spontaneously created texts the subject of the sentence can also be found in the nominative case. The purpose of the article is to analyse the verbs pietikt ‘suffice’ and trūkt ‘lack’ and their syntactic valency in connection with the subject of the sentence in affirmation and negation.

In the individual collection, there are 200 examples for each verb – 100 in the affirmative and the same number in the negative (400 examples in total). Spontaneous use of the Latvian language in social media texts, university seminars, colloquial speech, radio broadcasts has been chosen as the practical material of the study. For comparison, the corpus of the Latvian language “Pandemia Diaries” (PanDi) was selected, the texts of which have not been edited, as in the individual collection of the author of the article. The set of examples consists of 74 examples with the verb pietikt ‘suffice’ and 62 examples with the verb trūkt ‘lack’.

The verb netrūkt ‘not lack’ in connection with the subject of the sentence in the genitive has the highest percentage (87 %) in the individual collection. Analysing the PanDi data, where there are only 16 sentences with the verb trūkt ‘lack’ in negation, in all cases (100 %) it has a subject of the sentence in the genitive. The verb in negation is more connected to the subject of the sentence in the genitive both in the individual collection and PanDi data. It is also considered whether the analysed sentences are in oral or written form.