Constructions with the non-agreeing present passive participle ‘galima’ ‘it is possible’: from a complement-taking predicate to a discourse marker

Abstract

The focus of this article is on constructions with the non-agreeing present passive participle “galima” ‘it is possible’ and their use in academic texts, newspaper discourse, and fiction. The study employs the Corpus of Academic Lithuanian, the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language (the sub-corpus of the Lithuanian daily newspaper “Lietuvos Rytas”), and the parallel corpus ParaCorpEN→LT→EN. Two constructions were analyzed: GALIMA + INF (+ NP), THAT-S, and GALIMA + INF(PARENT). The results show that these constructions are more typical of scientific discourse rather than newspaper discourse or fiction, and are employed to express author stance, to create author-reader relationship, or to signal links between different parts of text. The construction GALIMA + INF (+ NP), THAT-S expresses the subjective attitude of the author and can also be used as a discourse organizing device. GALIMA + INF(PARENT) has developed into a discourse marker, which is syntactically less restricted and can be employed to mark intersubjectivity. In some cases the parenthetical construction is also used as a reformulation marker showing logical links between different parts of text. No obvious differences in the use of these constructions across different discourse types were observed, except for the frequency of their occurrence.