A generative syntactic analysis of Latvian grammatical prefixes<i> jā-</i>, <i>ne-</i>

The present study explores Latvian grammatical prefixes jā-, ne-, from the generative syntactic perspective. To date, in contrast to significant research within the traditional syntactic dimension, generative syntactic studies of Latvian in general have been very limited (e.g., Apse 2007; Fábregas et al. 2018; Kushnir 2019; Biks 2020), and verbal morphosyntax is yet to become a topic of discussion. Meanwhile, the two grammatical verbal prefixes under analysis raise a number of questions, such as their incompatibility with respect to one another in Standard Latvian, their placement on the generative syntactic tree, and the non-canonical case marking in the debitive construction. To answer these questions, the present study builds on the generative theory of X-bar syntax (Chomsky 1993; 1995), Rizzi’s (1997) Split-CP hypothesis, Case Theory (Chomsky 2001), and previous findings on the Baltic verb (Korostenskiene 2017; 2022). The proposed approach to the debitive construction and accompanying non-canonical case-marking in Latvian is hoped to contribute to the existing field of research as well as to have implications for the study of clausal phenomena in Baltic languages from the generative syntactic perspective.