Differentiation of finite verbs and finite clauses: Indo-European tradition and alternative approaches

The article analyzes the approaches to determining finiteness as inherent capacity of all natural languages, whether or not the capacity has a morphological marker. The study has concluded that 1) finiteness is a universal category, because it is connected with the illocutionary status of the sentence and because it is the syntax-semantics capacity that defines the finite status of a clause; 2) multi-component analysis only, including morphological, morphosyntactic and especially syntax-semantics criteria, permits the exhaustive definition of finiteness; 3) the category of finiteness should be regarded as gradation, scale or range, due to its continual character.