Verbal diathesis in the Baltic and Slavic languages in the light of the doctrine of Grigory K. Ulyanov and Philipp F. Fortunatov

The article deals with the opposition of Lithuanian and Slavic cognate verbs with the full and zero grade of root vocalism, investigated by Grigory K. Ulyanov and Philipp F. Fortunatov. Full grade verbs are transitive, they denote the actions that the subject can control. Zero grade verbs denote the processes and/or states uncontrolled by the subject, caused by the actions, expressed by full grade verbs. The author argues that the meaning of intransitivity or “anti-causativity” is one of the meanings connected with shifting the stress to the right, towards the end of the word form. The relevance of the paper is due to a great role of the simultaneous reconstruction at several levels of language (i. e., accentuation, ablaut and morphosemantics). Its novelty lies in the regular application of apophonic approach to the verbal morphology and meaning of verbal stems.