Latvian grammar - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Latvian language

Latvian is the official state language of Latvia. It is also sometimes referred to as Lettish. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. The Latvian language has a relatively large number of non-native speakers, atypical for a small language...

is a moderately inflected language, with complex nominal and verbal morphology. Word order is relatively free, but the unmarked order is SVO. Latvian has pre-nominal adjectives and both prepositions and postpositions. There is no definite or indefinite article

Article (grammar)

An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...

, but definiteness can be indicated by the endings of adjectives.

Nouns and adjectives

Latvian has two grammatical gender

Grammatical gender

Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

s (masculine and feminine) and seven cases

Grammatical case

In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...

. Adjectives generally precede the nouns they modify, and agree in case, number, and gender. In addition, adjectives take distinct endings to indicate definite and indefinite interpretation:

Viņa nopirka [vecu māju]. "She bought [an old house]."

Viņa nopirka [veco māju]. "She bought [the old house]."

For details about the nominal morphology

Morphology (linguistics)

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

of Latvian (inflection of nouns, pronouns, numerals, and adjectives), see Latvian declension

Latvian declension

Latvian declension describes the declension of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals in the Latvian language. There is a system of seven cases in Latvian.-Nouns:...

Verbs

Latvian has three simple tenses (present

Present tense

The present tense is a grammatical tense that locates a situation or event in present time. This linguistic definition refers to a concept that indicates a feature of the meaning of a verb...

, imperfect [or preterite

Preterite

The preterite is the grammatical tense expressing actions that took place or were completed in the past...

] and future

Future tense

In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,...

), and three compound perfect constructions: present perfect, past perfect, future perfect

Future Perfect

-Album Credits:*Produced by T-Bone Burnett*All Songs Written by Autolux*Engineered by Mike Piersante*Mixed by Dave Sardy*Mastered by Stephen Marcussen *Artwork by Carla Azar-Vinyl releases:...

. Latvian verbs are used in five moods

Grammatical mood

In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...

: indicative, imperative

Imperative mood

The imperative mood expresses commands or requests as a grammatical mood. These commands or requests urge the audience to act a certain way. It also may signal a prohibition, permission, or any other kind of exhortation.- Morphology :...

, conditional

Conditional mood

In linguistics, the conditional mood is the inflectional form of the verb used in the independent clause of a conditional sentence to refer to a hypothetical state of affairs, or an uncertain event, that is contingent on another set of circumstances...

, conjunctive (or "relative", used for reported speech) and "debitive" (for expressing obligation). The relations between tenses and moods are shown in the following table.

	Indicative	Imperative	Conditional	Conjunctive	Debitive
Simple present	+	+	+	+	+
Simple imperfect	+	-	-	-	+
Simple future	+	-	-	+	+
Present perfect	+	-	+	+	+
Past perfect	+	-	-	-	+
Future perfect	+	-	-	+	+

Latvian verbs have two voices, active and passive. The passive voice is analytic, combining an auxiliary verb (tikt "become", būt "be", or more rarely, tapt "become") and the past passive participle form of the verb. Reflexive verb

Reflexive verb

In grammar, a reflexive verb is a verb whose semantic agent and patient are the same. For example, the English verb to perjure is reflexive, since one can only perjure oneself...

s are marked morphologically by the suffix -s.

Participles

Past active
Past passive
Present active in -dams
Present active in -ošs
Present active in -ot
Present passive

Conjugation classes

Regular verbs in Latvian are divided into three conjugation

Grammatical conjugation

In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection . Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories...

classes. The first conjugation includes all verbs with a monosyllabic infinitive and their compounds. The second conjugation includes verbs that are derived with suffixes -ā, -ē, -o, -ī, -alē, -aļā, -elē, -uļo and that exhibit syllable lengthening in the imperfect and present tenses. The third conjugation includes verbs that are derived with suffixes -ā, -ē, -ī, -inā and display syllable lengthening in the imperfect. The following verbs are irregular

Irregular verb

In contrast to regular verbs, irregular verbs are those verbs that fall outside the standard patterns of conjugation in the languages in which they occur. The idea of an irregular verb is important in second language acquisition, where the verb paradigms of a foreign language are learned...

: būt "be", iet "go", dot "give".

A verb's conjugation pattern can be specified by giving three base forms: the infinitive form, the present stem and the past stem. The following table shows the correspondence between the base stem and the tense/mood.

stem	moods and tenses derived from this stem
present stem	present indicative, present conjunctive, imperative mood, debitive mood, present participles
past stem	imperfect, past active participle
infinitive stem	infinitive, future indicative, conditional mood, future conjunctive, past passive participle

Prepositions

Latvian has prepositions, and a small number of postpositions. Although each preposition requires a particular case

Grammatical case

(genitive, accusative, or dative) if the following noun phrase

Noun phrase

In grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....

is singular, all plural noun phrases appear in the dative case after a preposition.

External links

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