Converbs in Russian and Lithuanian

The paper gives a comparative overlook on peculiarities of Russian and Lithuanian converbs. Origins, modern usage of the forms and syntactic functions of converbs are summarized. Converbs are compared in regard of marking of verbal categories and relation to the subject of an action of a main verb. It is emphasized that the main semantic feature of these verb forms is a connection of an action referred by a converb to the action referred by verb, whereby converbs localize events on the time axis in the context of a deictic value of a main verb. From this point of view, converbs are a kind of dependent taxis where meanings (simultaneity / anteriority) have different morphological realization in Russian and Lithuanian: in Russian by means of the opposition of the lexical aspect markers, and in Lithuanian by means of the opposition of the tense markers. On the grounds of the analysis of corpora materials (RNC and CCLL), it is shown that equivalence between correlative forms (Russian imperfective converb – Lithuanian half-participle / non-agreeing present participle, Russian perfective converb – Lithuanian active past participle / non-agreeing past participle) is relevant in most instances of the contexts of a temporal relation, but in the contexts of logical relation there are regularities of dissimilar nature