Infinitīva palīgteikumi un teikuma tipu robežgadījumi „nacionālajā korpusu kolekcijā"

Infinitival subordinate clauses in Latvian are subordinated to a noun or a pronoun and express finality or suitability for an action, so they have an irrealis modal meaning. The pronoun which binds the clause may be omitted or reduced, thus creating borderline cases of a simple and a complex sentence. The predicative infinitive in various syntactic constructions was noted by Jānis Endzelīns, mostly in connection with the expression of modal meanings and the use of punctuation marks. However, deeper examination of the structure and semantics of infinitive constructions is needed in order to justify both their interpretation in the “Latvian Treebank,” as well as the rules of punctuation. The data of various corpora included in the “National Corpus Collection” have been selected for the study, which allows for a sufficiently comprehensive analysis of the structure and semantics of the subclauses. The constructions under analysis are divided into three groups, which are discussed separately: clauses subordinated to a noun, a pronoun, and headless clauses. The subordinators are lexical words fulfilling the syntactic function of a subject, an object or an adverbial in the subordinate clause — relative pronouns kas ‘what,’ kurš ‘which,’ and adverbs kur, kurp ‘where,’ kā ‘how.’ Both the syntactic relations between the predicate, the head, the subordinator and other word-forms in the sentence, as well as the semantic peculiarities of the subclause indicate the tendency towards lexicalization of the construction. It is concluded that sentences without a supporting word should be considered simple, not complex, and they can be tagged in the “Latvian Treebank” as one-component or two-component clauses, depending on the semantics and valency of the infinitive. Punctuation marks are not necessary in such constructions, but in case of the reduction (ellipsis) of the supporting word, the comma may be used.