This paper is the first empirical study of the construction TAKE (and V (“he took and left” = ‘he left suddenly, unexpectedly’) in contemporary Latvian and Lithuanian, carried out on a large sample of corpus data. The results obtained for Baltic are compared with Slavic (Polish, Russian) and Finnic (Estonian, Finnish) data from comparable corpora. It is argued that out of all the languages under consideration, in Baltic the construction is the most frequent and the most fixed in its form, while at the same time being able to appear in various inflectional forms and in various functions. Other languages differ in how they deviate from the Baltic type. It is also shown that its semantics is largely context-dependent, being sensitive to the semantics of the inflectional form, subject and type of the lexical verb.