THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL MEANINGS OF THE LATVIAN VERB TIKT

The Latvian verb tikt has diverse meanings and appears in many different contexts. For instance, tikt may express replacement and change of state and also may be used as an inchoative copula and an auxiliary. The current paper investigates the usage of tikt in the balanced corpus of the modern Latvian standard language. The work aims at establishing the main types of the meanings and contexts which are typical to tikt, as well as revealing historical connections between them. It starts with a survey on the usage of tikt, found in the corpus, and then analyses each of them in detail. In addition, it compares the results from the modern corpus with the data from a pilot investigation of a text from the beginning of the 20th century.