Criteria for finiteness and morphosyntax of Lithuanian participles.

The paper discusses the morphosyntactic properties of Lithuanian participles in the light of the cross-linguistic criteria distinguishing between fi nite and nonfi nite verbal forms, i. e. marking of tense, agreement with the subject, expression and case marking of the subject etc. An analysis of the major uses of Lithuanian participles, i. e. as independent predicates of evidential constructions, as heads of subordinate clausal arguments, adjuncts and relative modifi ers, and as lexical components of periphrastic verbal forms, shows that in different constructions Lithuanian participles show varying degrees of (non) fi niteness and that their morphosyntactic properties are largely determined by the constructions in which they appear. Thus, the notions «fi nite» and «nonfi nite» are shown to be non-elementary and to some extent epiphenomenal.