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Dėl nepatikimos informacijos Daivos Šveikauskienės straipsnyje „Lietuvių kalbos gramatikos informacinė sistema: I morfologija“, publikuotame elektroniniame žurnale Lietuvių kalba 2016 m. nr. 10.

Straipsnyje aptariama modelio negyvas subjektas + aktyvų veiksmą reiškiantis veiksmažodis realiza­cija lingvistiniuose straipsniuose anglų kalba. Nustatomas bendras modelio dažnumas bei dažniausiai pasikartojantys veiksmažodžiai bei subjektai, atskleidžiama jų reikšmė ir funkcijos. Rezultatai lygina­mi su lingvisto Master’io (2001) straipsnyje aprašomais tyrimo, grindžiamo moksliniais straipsniais tiksliųjų mokslų tematika, rezultatais. Abiejų tyrimų metu nustatyta, kad tiriamas modelis vyrauja aiškinamojo tipo kontekstuose.Kvantitatyvinis aspektas papildomas interpretaciniu, pasitelkiant konceptualiosios metaforos teo­riją. Nustatytos šios dažniausiai pasitaikančios metaforos: tyrimas yra žmogus, tyrimas yra kelionė, tyrimas yra statinys, tyrimas yra ekonominė veikla bei tyrimas yra paslapties atskleidimas. Pirmoji metafora iš dalies sutampa su metonimijomis.Šio tyrimo rezultatai galėtų pasitarnauti diskurso analizės tyrimams bei dėstant akademinį rašymą negimtakalbiams.

Šiame straipsnyje, remiantis pavyzdžiais, surinktais iš Anglų filologijos katedros studentų bakalaurinių ir magistrinių darbų, analizuojami tų darbų pavadinimai bei mokslinio darbo plano rašymo būdai. Pavadinimai nagrinėjami keliais aspektais – visų pirma, aptariama jų funkcijos, 153tiriama jų sintaksinės ir struktūrinės ypatybės. Be to, nemaža dėmesio skiriama sąšvelnių (hedging) ir intertekstualumo naudojimui mokslinių darbų pavadinimuose, t.p. paminimi nauji efektingi būdai kurti pavadinimus. Kita straipsnio dalis skirta aptarti problemoms, kylančioms rašant mokslinio dar­bo planą. Išskiriami dviejų tipų sunkumai – susiję su darbo turiniu, kai planas yra per daug bendras ir neatspindi darbo turinio, ir sunkumai, susiję su plano forma – kai nesilaikoma tos pačios sintaksinės formos. Išvadose teigiama, jog šios dvi įvadinės mokslinio darbo dalys, nors iš pirmo žvilgsnio ir galinčios atrodyti nelabai svarbios, iš tiesų atlieka rimtą informacinę bei reklaminę funkciją, todėl siūlant akademinio rašymo kursą, joms reikėtų skirti nemaža dėmesio.

Straipsnyje nagrinėjamas užduočių sekos principo (USP) efektyvumas taikant jį anglų filologijos programos bakalauro studijų pakopos rašymo kurse. Iki šiol USP naudotas tik praktinei negimtajai kalbai mokytis. Jo esmę sudaro užduočių seka, kurioje paskesnė užduotis remiasi ankstesne. Susidūrus su studentų darbo grupėje motyvacijos problema, kai kiekvienas iš jų rašo individualų bakalauro darbą pagal pasirinktą temą, mėginta pritaikyti USP bei recenzavimo metodą („peer review“) darbui grupėje rašant mokslinio darbo įvadą. Swales‘o CARS modelio seka buvo šiek tiek pakeista, tarp sudedamųjų dalių įterptas studentų recenzavimas. Paaiškėjo, kad USP, taikytas kartu su recenzavimo metodu, yra labai efektyvus skatinant darbą grupėje, o kartu ugdo studentų motyvaciją rašyti pasirinktą individualų darbą. Sistemingas recenzavimo metodo taikymas padėjo studentams įsitraukti į kritikų / recenzentų vaidmenį. USP ir recenzavimo metodas paskatino studentus rašant darbus atsižvelgti į skaitytoją, suvokti save kaip akademinės bendruomenės dalį, poreikį laikytis vertingų akademinių normų. Jis taip pat perkėlė daugiau atsakomybės už mokymosi procesą studentui. The article examines the effectiveness of the task dependency principle (TDP) as applied in the Bachelor's Degree English Philology Program Graded Writing Course. Until now the TDP has been used only for practical non-native language learning. Its essence is the use of task dependency, whereby a later task follows on from and depends on an earlier one. When motivation problems are encountered in student work group, when each one of them is writing an individual bachelor’s assignment according to their own choice of topic, it is attempted to apply TDP or the peer review method within the work group when the introduction is being written for each assignment. The Swales CARS model of dependency was modified to include peer review among its component parts. It has become apparent that TDP, applied along with the peer review method, is a very effective way of encouraging work in a group, and it also foments student motivation to write the chosen individual assignment. The systematic application of a peer review method helped students get involved as critics or the reviewee. TDP, along with the peer review method, encouraged students writing assignments to take account of the reader, and to see themselves as part of the academic community, with the need to uphold valuable academic norms. This method also transfers more responsibility for the learning process onto the student.

Currently the research paper (RP) is the central genre of many (perhaps all) disciplines at university level. Writing a research paper is no easy undertaking for L1 students and it goes without saying that it is one of the most demanding and time-consuming assignments for EFL students. Recent years have seen increased attention being given to RP writing, however, the focus is typically on what is called the body of the RP. For example, in his Genre Analysis Swales presents his famous IMRD pattern of an RP (1998, 133-7) and the CARS model of the introduction (ibid., 222-4) but the preliminaries (except abstracts) are not included there (by preliminaries I mean titles, abstracts, acknowledgements, and outlines). True, he did investigate titles in an appendix of the book, but not acknowledgements or outlines. Typically prelims receive scant attention during practical RP writing courses as well since many teachers consider investigation into their properties merely a waste of valuable time. The purpose of this article is to discover to what extent EFL students are familiar with different patterns of composing prelims and what problems they encounter. On the basis of the findings I expect to demonstrate that the preliminary sections of an RP (which are sometimes referred to as minor genres or subgenres) deserve attention and require considerable rhetorical expertise since there is more to them than meets the eye.The corpus of the investigation is drawn from the texts of BA and MA theses composed by students of the English Philology Department, Vilnius University, in the year 2003-2006 and consists of 136 titles. To illustrate new developments in the area of composing RP titles texts of expert writers were used (examples (9), (10), (15), (16), (17), (18), (19)).Due to the limited scope of the article the analysis will concern only titles and outlines. First I will investigate titles with a special focus on the following points: importance of RP titles; functions of RP titles; their syntactic and structural properties; language points; emerging trends and fashions in the area; frequency of occurence of specific title patterns in students’ texts. The next section will be devoted to problems concerning effective outlining including the rules to observe with reference to content and the rules to observe with reference to structure.Why are RP titles important? Even though they consist, at best, of two or three lines, they play a significant role in the reception of the text, since the audience bases their decisions whether to read further basically on the title, outline, and the abstract. According to Swales, ‘it comes as little surprise that composing the few words of a title can take up inordinate amount of time, discussion, and mental effort’ (1998, 223).

This paper examines the argument for the existence of gods, formulated by the Athenian in the 10th book of Plato’s Laws. The purpose of this investigation is to find out whether the argument persuades its intended audience – the atheists. The analysis is divided into three parts: 1) the investigation of the Athenian’s concept of persuasion; 2) the examination of the argument’s audience; 3) the reconstruction of the argument and the evaluation of its logical soundness, compliance with the defined criteria of persuasion, and suitability for the defined audience. This paper argues that the Athenian’s argument for the existence of gods should persuade atheists.

It is stated that children in their speech master directives at their earliest age and they use them the most frequently. However, it is currently unknown how these directives develop in the Lithuanian language and how their expression changes when a child grows up. This article investigates the change in the number and expression of directives during child’s raising, and what their differences emerge individually by comparing the speech of girls and boys. It is expected that the analysis conducted during the work will contribute to the studies of children’s pragmatic competence in Lithuania, i.e. to establish the most common characteristics typical to the directives used by children, by comparing the directives used by pre-school children at the beginning of the academic year and in its end in order to identify the differences and how children’s speech changes when more intensive formal education starts. The paper involves the gender dimension by expecting that differences in the language may be also envisaged between girls and boys. The object of this paper is directives used in spontaneous dialogues of pre-school children. The work material consists of 12 children’s dialogues, which have been transcribed and encoded morphologically by Software CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System). The following methods were applied during the work: 1) Cross-sectional (by sampling the subjects and gathering the work material); 2) Linguistic text corpora (by filing and analysing a child language text by Software CHILDES); 3) Comparative (by comparing: a) Data of the speech of girls and boys; b) Data of the speech of five-year-olds and six-year-olds). After summarising the results of this research, it might be stated that even pre-school children can use different forms of directive types. As it was expected, more difficult constructions and forms develop by experiencing more different situations, what is seen when the stages change (at the beginning and in the end of the study). The gender dimension highlighted in the study suggests that considerable differences were not identified, and most cases reported indicate more common charcteristics.

Straipsnyje nagrinėjami anglų kalbos diskurso žymikliai kind of ir sort of ir jų lietuviški atitikmenys. Šie anglų kalbos žymikliai pastaraisiais dešimtmečiais sulaukė nemažai tyrėjų dėmesio, tačiau kontrastyviniu aspektu jie beveik netirti: lygintos tik anglų ir čekų kalbos (Janebovà, Martinkovà 2017), o jų atitikmenys lietuvių kalboje visai nenagrinėti. Tyrimas remiasi tekstynų inspiruota kiekybine ir kokybine metodologija – empirinė medžiaga yra paimta iš dvikrypčio lygiagrečiojo tekstyno ParaCorpEN→LT→EN, sudaryto iš grožinės literatūros tekstų ir jų vertimų. Straipsnio tikslas – aprašyti šių žymiklių vartosenos kiekybinius ir kokybinius parametrus, nustatyti jų vertimo atitikmenų bei funkcijų (tekstinių ir tarpasmeninių) koreliaciją lietuvių kalboje.Gauti rezultatai rodo, kad kind of ir sort of dažniausiai vartojami daiktavardinėse konstrukcijose, tačiau, be pirminės propozicinės reikšmės žymėti rūšį ir tipą, šiose konstrukcijose jie dažnai funkcionuoja kaip diskurso žymikliai. Rečiau vartojami nedaiktavardinėse konstrukcijose, tačiau tada jie visada funkcionuoja tik kaip diskurso žymikliai. Atlikta šių anglų kalbos žymiklių kokybinė-funkcinė analizė parodė, kad jie yra įvairialypiai: gali atlikti ir diskurso struktūravimo (tekstines), ir tarpasmenines funkcijas. Didelė kind of ir sort of atitikmenų įvairovė vertimuose ir originaliuose tekstuose parodo, kad lietuvių kalboje nėra tiesioginių šių žymiklių ekvivalentų ir diskurso funkcijoms žymėti pasirenkamos kitos raiškos priemonės. Labai retai propoziciškai pavartoti kind of ir sort of verčiami tiesioginiais atitikmenimis (rūšis, kategorija, tipas); dažniausi atitikmenys lietuvių kalboje yra nurodomieji įvardžiai tie / šie ir toks / šitoks. Kai kind of ir sort of vartojami kaip diskurso žymikliai, dažniausi jų atitikmenys lietuvių kalboje (ir verstiniuose, ir originaliuose tekstuose) buvo nežymimieji įvardžiai kažkas / kažkoks, kažin koks / kokia ir dalelytės tartum / tarsi / lyg (ir), rodantys kalbėtojo abejonę, švelninantys propoziciją ir vartojami mandagumo sumetimais, siekiant išsaugoti kalbėtojo ir pašnekovo veidą (angl. face saving) ar nurodant į bendrąsias žinias. Reikia pažymėti, kad nemažai atvejų sudarė nulinė atitiktis. Tai rodo menką leksinį kalbamų junginių svorį, kai perteikti jų reikšmę vertimo kalboje nebūtina, multifunkcionalumą ir vartosenos priklausomybę nuo konteksto. The present paper reports on the English type nouns kind of and sort of and their Lithuanian correspondences in a contrastive perspective. This paper aims to describe the quantitative and qualitative distribution of the English kind of andsort of, to determine their translational correspondences in Lithuanian as well as to reveal how Lithuanian correspondences correlate with the functions (textual and interpersonal) that kind of and sort of perform in original and translated fiction texts. The research method is a quantitative and qualitative contrastive analysis based on data extracted from the self-compiled bidirectional corpus ParaCorpEN→LT→EN comprising fiction texts. The results show that kind of and sort of are prone to be used NP-internally; however, even in this construction they can feature as DMs. Kind of and sort of function as unambiguous DMs when they completely lose their nominality, i.e. are used NP-externally. The functional and semantic potential of the type nouns is fully reflected by their TCs. Very rarelykind of and sort of denoting a type are translated congruently into a Lithuanian type noun; they usually correspond to demonstrative pronouns. As discourse markers, kind of and sort of are realised by different Lithuanian correspondences which may help establish the common ground between the speaker and the hearer or refer to the previous context, may indicate epistemic imprecision, approximation or downtone a proposition. The high number of zero correspondence shows that the Lithuanian type nouns have not advanced on the grammaticalization path the way the English type nouns have and due to the multifunctionalilty, non-propositionality and context-dependence there is no one-to-one correspondence of the markers under scrutiny.

The paper aims to explore where and why an ordinary member of language community creates the dialecticity of a locality and evaluate whether (and how) the dialect artefact of an ordinary member of language community is related with the dialecticity recognised and estimated by researchers, or, in other words, discuss the interaction of the emic and etic perspectives. The empirical basis for the discussion about the interaction of the emic and etic perspectives is formed on the verbalised and visualised language attitudes of the ordinary members of language community and the data of the text-stimuli perceptions gathered during the project “The Position of Standard Language in the Mental Map of the Lithuanian Language” carried out in 2014–2016 and supplied with the data of the ongoing project “Distribution of Regional Variants and Quasistandard Language at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Perceptual Approach (Perceptual Categorisation of Variants”, 2017–2019. The respondents of both projects are the first-fourth year grammar school pupils whom the scholars associate with the emic perspective. The first attempt concerned the data related with the verbalised and visualised (in the drawn maps) language attitudes of 1.415 teenagers; the second one analysed the data related with the verbalised and visualised (in the drawn maps) language attitudes of 1.064 youngsters and the data of the perception of the text-stimuli recorded in an adequate dialect. Both projects are interrelated with regard to the subject matter and the pursued goals: in the first case, an attempt was made to analyse the geolinguistic competence of an ordinary member of language community; in the second one, an additional aspect of the perceptual abilities of an ordinary member of language community was considered. During the performance of the two projects the essential criterion for the selection of the locations in the regions of Lithuania to be explored was whether they were (non)marked by dialect. Hence the respondent groups were formed in the regiolect and/or geolect zones, and in the second project the task of the text-stimuli perception had motivated the inclusion of the Lithuanian cities. The problem of how an ordinary member of language community creates the dialecticity of a location has been approached on the basis of the data given in the drawn maps presented in the two projects. The participants of the first project have drawn the so called perceptual isoglosses in two maps, i.e. in one map they have marked the areas where people speak in dialect and, in the other, where standard language was used. Meanwhile, the participants of the second project in their drawn maps related the linguistic homeland with other locations due to the similarity (or simultaneity) of expression. They also had to draw the maps of standard language and, in addition, localise 8 text-stimuli given to them for assessment which contained the 14–19 seconds fragments of spontaneous speech representing various regiolectic zones. To summarise the obtained results, it should be claimed that etic and emic discourses should be essentially related to the cause and effect factor. The narrative of an ordinary member of language community not only reveals the specific interior relationships but is also affected from outside. Such an insight is determined by the interaction between the created dialecticity of a locality and the dialecticity of localities legitimated in scientific discourse. The results obtained in both projects on perceptual dialectology show that the dialecticity of a locality has been constructed on the basis of adequate etic information: it is obvious from the drawn maps that dialecticity is attracted by the localities that are highly dialect-oriented, i.e. the geolectic and regiolectic areas. This assumption is based on the localisation of the text-stimulus having the most distinct features of dialect which confirms that dialect recognition by the ordinary members of language community does not enter into conflict with the researcher's evaluation from outside. Thus it shows that localities do consistently attract the text-stimuli having the most distinct features of dialect . Meanwhile, as a place of dialect levelling, the capital (or any city) accurately correlates with the NORM reflection of traditional dialectology. The paper summarises that it is not clear yet in what ways the constructors of the narrative from inside are affected by the narratives from outside. There is no tradition formed in the works on perceptual dialectology and no adequate methodological instruments have been devised which might help to find out the sources of knowledge, images and attitudes of the ordinary members of language community. Hence, in order to more clearly describe the relationship between the narrative of a researcher and that of an ordinary member of language community it would be reasonable to move an additional step forward – to expand the instrumentarium and methods of research by including the reflections of the ordinary members of language community regarding the knowledge, images and attitudes that they possess in the field of dialecticity. Thus a new perspective in dialectology should be initiated. Keywords: Dialecticity of a location; Narrative; Locality Created

Straipsnis skirtas lietuvių tarmių transkripcijos klausimams. Jame aptariamas tarptautinės fonetinės abėcėlės (TFA, angl. International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA]) santykis su pastaruoju metu plačiai taikomais Palemono rašmenimis. Lietuvoje beveik ištisą šimtmetį, nuo XX a. pr. iki XXI a. pr., gyvuoja tradicija užrašyti tarmių tekstus Georgo Gerullio adaptuota vadinamąja kopenhagine transkripcija. Susiformavusi lietuvių transkripcijos sistema didele dalimi ženklų skiriasi nuo kitų kalbų, net nuo artimiausių kaimynų latvių, todėl tyrėjai dažnai susiduria su problemomis, kylančiomis gretinant kelių kalbų tyrimų rezultatus. Skirtingos transkripcijos klausimai tapo dar aktualesni XXI a. pr., įsigalint kiekybiniams kalbų variantiškumo matavimams, kurie dažniausiai atliekami identiško duomenų pateikimo reikalaujančiomis kompiuterinėmis programomis. Diskusinio pobūdžio straipsnyje analizuojamos TFA simbolių taikymo lietuvių tarmių garsams galimybės, aptariami balsių, priebalsių, kai kurių fonetinių požymių ir prozodinių vienetų žymėjimo atitikmenys Palemono ir TFA rinkiniuose, teikiama abiem sistemomis transkribuotų žodžių pavyzdžių iš įvairių lietuvių patarmių. The paper discusses the issues of transcription of Lithuanian dialects. It compares the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) with the characters of the currently popular font Palemonas. From the 20th to the 21st century, almost for a whole century, there has been a tradition in Lithuania to mark texts of Lithuanian dialects using the so-called Copenhagen transcription that was adapted by Georg Gerullis. The established Lithuanian transcription system largely differs from those applied in other languages, even from the closest neighbours Latvians. Therefore, researchers are often confronted with the problems of comparing the research results of several languages. In the 21st century the issues of different transcriptions became more relevant after quantitative measurements of language variance became popular. They are usually made by computer programs which require identical data. The discussion paper analyses the opportunities for IPA application to the sounds of Lithuanian dialects, discusses the marking correspondences of vowels, consonants, some phonetic features and prosodic units in the font Palemonas and IPA, and provides examples of words from various Lithuanian subdialects transcribed by applying both systems.

The aim of the current paper is to analyze Latvian reflexive verbs from the point of view of their polyfunctionality and distributon.The polysemy of the reflexive verbs is not usually disucussed in the connection with its distribution pattern in the sentence either. This can be partly explianed by the fact that the reflexive verb can have some non-standard language meanings, which following the established practice of the traditional grammars and sometimes even dictionaries, were not depicted in the language system description either. So the current paper is an attempt to analyze the polyfunctionality of reflexive verbs in connection with their semantic and syntactic functions, without judging the language use from the normative point of view.The classification of Latvian reflexive verbs is based on the relationship between semantic roles and syntactic structure according to the principles devised by Palmer (1994) and Saeed (1997).One and the same reflexive verb may have different lexical meanings with a different distribution for each of the meanings. One and the same verb can belong to different subclasses of the subject and object (or impersonal) verbs.Some reflexive verbs have evaluative or aspectual (iterative) meanings. The evaluative meanings usually are manifested by a positive or negative assessment of the event (the context can be enhanced by the adverbs good or bad) and the consequences while the aspectual meaning is manifested by the intensity of the action, that is – iterativity.The study confirms the assumption that reflexive verbs are independent lexemes as opposed to non-reflexive verb forms. Each reflexive verb has its distinct semantic system and distribution which is different from polysemy of non-reflexive verbs and their distribution. The system of reflexive verbs in Latvian is open where new meanings and even new reflexive verbs arise particularly in colloquial use.

This paper discusses the unusual reference to Homer in Federico Borromeo’s De pictura sacra in which Homer is quoted as an authoritative aesthetic and historical source to justify the depiction of wingless angels by Michelangelo. It is said that the great Greek poet represented the gods without wings as if they could move with their feet joined together. The first part of the article examines this relatively obscure remark and its possible sources. One of the reasons for such a quotation is the general Renaissance attitude towards Classical texts to provide a historical perspective and establish an authoritative argumentation. However, a closer analysis discloses that Borromeo refers to Homer not simply as an aesthetic and historical but as a quasi-theological source of God-inspired wisdom.

The article is devoted to the study of the image of the trickster – one of the key ones in modern Russian culture and literature. The article analyzes the specifics of the functioning and attribution of the trickster figure in V. Makanin‘s novel The Underground, or the Hero of Our Time (1998). This is a soliloquium novel. It is shown how the appearance of the trickster hero, who is aware of his connection with the myth, helps to solve the tragic issues facing the consciousness of the turn of the XX-XXI centuries. The life – affirming, vital potential of the image of the main character of the novel – Petrovich is considered, the inherent possibilities, means of awareness and representation of the tragic are revealed. The paper examines the intertextual field of the character’s image, including the archetypes of “naked man”, “little man”, “extra man” and “underground man”, who made up the canon of Russian classics. The reinterpretation of archetypes is the realization of the author’s attempt, his hero, to “push” Russia into the next century, free from the dictates of the literary canon, opening up the prospect of finding one’s own Word as a self-determination of an individual in the new century.

The present paper is based on the assumption that the language of the novel is characterized by a statistically relevant overrepresentation of certain linguistic units (e.g. lexemes, key words, collocations and colligations, Siepmann 2015). First steps towards checking the validity of this hypothesis had been undertaken in pioneering works in the 1990s/2000s (e.g. Stubbs & Barth 2003). These studies were however limited by the small size of their (exclusively English) corpora. The present study explores the role of some patterns (phraseological motifs) in distinguishing French literary subgenres. It also proposes a case study of some motifs related to the verbal (dire avec sourire ‘to say with a smile’) and non-verbal communication (adresser un sourire ‘to send a smile’). Unlike traditional corpus-stylistic analyses, which frequently focus on the style of a single author, our corpus-driven approach identifies lexico-syntactic constructions in literary genres which are automatically extracted from the corpora.The main purpose is to show the relevance of the notion of phraseological motif (Legallois 2012; Longrée & Mellet 2013; Novakova & Siepmann 2020) for the distinction of literary subgenres. Linking form and meaning, these ‘multidimensional units’ fulfil pragmatic as well as discursive functions.The data has been extracted from large French corpora of the PhraseoRom research project https://phraseorom.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr. They are accessible on http://phraseotext.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/phraseobase/index.html and contain 1000 novels (published from the 1950s to the present), partitioned into six sub-corpora: general literature (GEN), crime fiction (CRIM), romances (ROM), historical novels (HIST), science fiction (SF) and fantasy (FY).The results of our study reveal some unexpected differences between the literary subgenres: e.g. the motif dire d’une voix ‘to say in a voice’ in HIST compared to GEN. In FY, expressions of verbal communication are related to shouting and screaming. Expressions related to the non-verbal communication (prendre dans ses bras ‘to take in one’s arms’) are specific to ROM, where body language is overrepresented. In SF, there is a very limited number of these types of expressions. More generally, the motifs provide the link between the micro level (phraseological recurrences) and the macro level (the fictional script).

In this paper, we discuss the question of discourse markers (DM) – a category conceived differently by theoretical and applied linguistic approaches. Unlike in applied approaches, in which DMs are considered desemantized/grammaticalized lexical units devoid of their own semantics and therefore of status in the language, we consider DMs to constitute a full-fledged category of language, having its own semantics and distribution, both of which play a crucial role in the construction of discourse (Paillard 2011, 2012; Franckel 2008, 2019). This hypothesis has been developed in theoretical linguistics and has seen little evidence from a perspective of the acquisition and didactics of foreign languages. Based on cross-analysis of linguistic theories (Benveniste 1974; Ducrot 1980; Hopper & Traugott 1993; Culioli 1990,1999; Franckel & Paillard 2008) and on distributional analysis of data of the spoken corpora, we show that the absence of specific linguistic status for DMs has repercussions at the didactic and acquisition levels: DMs are generally approached in an ad hoc manner, all functions combined, which leads on the one hand to gaps in the acquisition of French and, on the other hand, to the ambiguity of criteria for evaluation. Therefore, at the level of applied linguistics, we suggest the integration of DMs in the learning path as a full category, an integration that must be carried out on several axes – semantic, syntax and prosodic – and be based on an authentic oral corpora of the spoken language. At the theoretical level, we use transversal analysis in order to give yet another argument in favor of a semantical-enunciative approach to discursive markers.

In the recent decade the realisations of evidentiality and epistemic modality in European languages have received a great scholarly interest and resulted in important investigations concerning the relation between evidentiality and epistemic modality, their means of expression and meaning extensions in various types of discourse. The present paper deals with the adverbials akivaizdžiai ‘evidently’, aiskiai ‘clearly’, ryskiai ‘visibly, clearly’, matyt ‘apparently, evidently’ and regis ‘seemingly’, which derive from the source domain of perception, and the epistemic necessity adverbials tikriausiai/veikiausiai / greiciausiai ‘most probably’, būtinai ‘necessarily’ and neabejotinai ‘undoubtedly’. The aim of the paper is to explore the morphosyntactic properties of the adverbials when they are used as evidential or epistemic markers and compare the distribution of their evidential and epistemic functions in Lithuanian fiction, news and academic discourse. The data have been drawn from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language, the Corpus of Academic Lithuanian and the bidirectional translation corpus ParaCorp EN→LT→EN (Solienė 2012, 2015). The quantitative findings reveal distributional differences of the adverbials under study across different types of discourse. Functional variation of the evidential perception-based adverbials is determined to a great extent by the degree of epistemic commitment, evidenced not only by intra-linguistic but also cross-linguistic data. The non-perception based adverbials tikriausiai/veikiausiai / greiciausiai ‘most probably’, būtinai ‘necessarily’ and neabejotinai ‘undoubtedly’ are the primary adverbial markers of epistemic necessity in Lithuanian, though some of them may have evidential meaning extensions. A parallel and comparable corpus-based analysis has once again proved to be a very efficient tool for diagnosing language-specific features and describing an inventory used to code language-specific evidential and epistemic meanings.

The aim of this paper is to investigate ‘I promise’ and its counterpart in (Peninsular) Spanish prometo. After briefly revisiting the theoretical debate on performativity and performative verbs, the paper adopts a corpus-based approach to quantify the main uses of ‘I promise’ in both languages. This contrastive analysis has an ultimate didactic purpose, since these verbs can raise problems of understanding and use for Spanish learners of English as a foreign language (EFL henceforth) and of translation studies. In order to carry out this analysis, the British National Corpus and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual were used, manually fine-graining the initial automatic search. To make both datasets comparable, only the oral and the fiction sections were considered since they are both shared by the two corpora. Interestingly, during the analysis there has also emerged an unexpected result which seems to be pointing out to the beginning of a linguistic change in Spanish. Thus, it can be observed that there is an emergent use in Spanish of the verb amenazar (‘to threaten’), sometimes with the action function of “promising”. This emergent use seems to be especially frequent in computer-mediated communication (e.g. blogs, forums, etc.) but it is still extremely rare in English.

This paper deals with the expression of evaluation in German and Lithuanian court judgments in civil cases. The purpose is to analyze lexical and grammatical devices, used by the court – the source of evaluation in this text type – in its judgments to express its opinion towards certain objects of evaluation. The analyzed corpus consists of 10 randomly selected court judgments in German (44 522 words in total) and 10 in Lithuanian (38 347 words in total). The actual scope of the paper is a particular part of the judgments, namely, the grounds, in which the court examines the suit, pleadings of the parties, certain issues, facts and circumstances relevant for the decision etc. and gives its reasons for the decision. The respective parts of court decisions make up a subcorpus of 29 274 words in German and 18 693 words in Lithuanian. The main focus of the research are the aspects of evaluation, i. e. particular attributes of the objects evaluated. It has been found that in the analyzed court judgments the objects are evaluated in terms of success, merits, admissibility, veracity, reasonableness, persuasiveness, suitability, extent, probability etc. The research shows that lexical devices used in the court judgments in both languages to express the evaluation are typically formed on the same basis, e. g. tikėtina ‘(it is) probable’ and tikimybė ‘probability’, abejoti ‘to doubt’ and abejonės ‘doubts’, unangemessen ‘unreasonable’ and Unangemessenheit ‘unreasonableness’; zweifelhaft ‘dubious’, zweifelsfrei ‘free of doubt’ and Zweifel ‘doubt’. In comparison to the German court judgments analyzed, Lithuanian court judgments contain an wider diversity of specific lexical constructions containing verba dicendi and verba putandi, in which the evaluating subject is encoded explicitly. The constructions found include the following: teismas sprendžia, kad/jog ‘the court rules that’, teismas laiko, kad ‘the court assumes that’, teismas vertina, kad ‘the court assesses that’, teismas daro išvadą, kad ‘the court concludes that’, teismo vertinimu ‘upon the court’s assessment’ etc., whereas only the verb überzeugen ‘to convince’ and one construction with the derivate of the latter: zur Überzeugung des Gerichts ‘the court is convinced’ are found in the German judgments analyzed). Furthermore, it has been noted that in this text type, lexical devices are also used to indicate that the particular issue is not relevant in this lawsuit and is not going to be evaluated. In addition, the paper examines optional elements of the evaluative construction: motivations, intensifiers and de-intensifiers. The evaluation is enhanced both lexically and by combining two and more lexemes, whereas the signals of de-intensification vary in the analyzed judgments of both languages: in addition to grammatical means, diverse lexical modal words, such as kaum ‘hardly’, grundsätzlich ‘basically’, offenbar ‘apparently’, jedenfalls ‘at any rate’, vielmehr ‘rather’ are used in the German judgments, whereas in Lithuanian, there is mainly a participle of necessity employed in this way, and the lexical modifiers used are limited to the construction iš esmės ‘basically’.

The paper examines Lithuanian posture constructions such as stovi stačias ‘stands uprightʼ which have been briefly discussed in Holvoet (2008). However, a more exhaustive examination has not been carried out yet. The discussion is based on 1002 examples from The Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language. Some of the secondary predicates occurring in posture constructions exhibit semantic features of either resultatives or depictives, while the others cannot be clearly judged as resultatives or depictives since they show both kinds of features. The encoding of the secondary predicates also oscillates between the depictive and the resultative marking. Thus the purpose of the paper is to establish the factors which determine different semantic interpretations and different formal marking of the construction. The author follows Holvoet (2008) in assuming that the semantic structure of the constructions depends on the semantic features of the verb. It is proposed that the lexical aspect and the lexical meaning of the verb determine a resultative, a depictive or a “neutralized” (“intermediate”) interpretation of the construction. As the data show, the secondary predicate is usually encoded by an adjective (depictive-like marking), however, sometimes it is expressed by an adverb (resultative-like marking) as well. It is assumed that the choice between the adjective and the adverb is determined by the lexical features of the secondary predicate rather than of the verb. Some of the posture notions seem to be more oriented towards the participant of an event and thus opt to be expressed by an adjective, while others are more oriented towards the event and therefore are encoded by an adverb. It is hypothesized that the reason for the oscillating marking lies in the constructions with a neutralized meaning. The cases which are ambiguous between the depictive and the resultative meaning constitute a precondition for establishing the double marking. This twofold marking is then extended to the constructions which carry clearly the depictive or the resultative meaning.

Expression of time is an important field in linguistic research. In Lithuanian linguistics, the study of time has focused first and foremost on tense and aspect systems. Therefore, Lithuanian language has developed a big diversity of means to encode time, e.g. noun cases ( vasarą ‘in summer’) and noun phrases ( liepos vakarą ‘in July evening’), prepositional phrases ( po darbo ‘after work’), adverbs ( netrukus ‘soon’), subordinate clauses ( kai nustos lyti ‘when it stops raining’). All of them despite their different grammatical status are suggested to be called temporal adverbials. ‘Adverbial’ is a quite new notion in Lithuanian linguistics, it was first presented in the studies of stance adverbials but is also convenient in the field of linguistic expression of time. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate the necessity of distinguishing a semantic-functional class of temporal adverbials in Lithuanian linguistics and to show their position in the system of means that encode time. The second part of the paper presents a few semantic models of the temporal adverbials made by foreign linguists and the semantic research of Lithuanian temporal means that should be regarded as temporal adverbials. Keywords: linguistic expression of time; temporal adverbial; adverb; tense; aspect; lexical aspect; deixis of time DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/Lietkalb.2016.10.9923

The subject of this paper is the multiplicity of meaning of the word pietas as it is used in the famous inscription CIL VI, 1527 called Laudatio Turiae. In revealing traditional and innovative aspects of this notion, the author tries to see the ideology of relations in the Roman family of the laudator and the laudata behind it, and to set it into the context of the changing world in the times of the Late Republic and the Principate within the Roman history.The inscription reveals that, in the eyes of laudator, pietas is the most important virtue of his defunct wife, laudata. In the course of the research, three features of pietas are marked out: 1) the virtue of pietas is operative exclusively in the sphere of family relations; 2) pietas relations always presuppose the hierarchical ones (e.g. children to the father / mother, wife to husband, younger brother / sister to the elder one); 3) the virtue of pietas always implies a strong action. Some new aspects of the functioning of the virtue of pietas can be observed when exploring the usage of the word in the inscription. For the first time in the Latin literature, the word pietas signifies the transfer of the virtue of pietas into the female domain, using it to describe the relation of the younger sister to the elder. But the most striking innovation is an inversion of the hierarchical order of children to the parents. For the first time, pietas means the duty of the parents to bring up their children in the best manner possible – an obligation which will find its place in the Roman law codes.The large usage of the notion of pietas and experimentation with its meaning, which finds parallels in the poetry of the Augustan age (Virgil, Ovid) signifies the susceptibility of the laudator to the ideas of the Augustan policies and his ideological stances.The article is preceded by a Lithuanian translation of the inscription with a short introduction.

The aim of the paper is to investigate adverbial clauses of time, cause, condition and concession in spontaneous private communication. The study explores semantic relations between the main and subordinate clauses, grammatical features and predominant conjunctions.The data for the research was collected from the morphologically annotated Corpus of Spoken Lithuanian, namely, its sub-corpus of spontaneous private speech which is used at home, at friends’ place, or which is produced by close friends.The analysis of spontaneous private communication shows that the finite adverbial clauses of time, cause, condition and concession are related to a set of conjunctions, but other indicators such as the use of verbal categories (especially tense, aspect and mood), contextual lexical markers as well as pragmatic inference also help to determine the semantic relationship between the main and the subordinate clause.In a spoken language, temporal clauses are usually combined with the conjunctions kai, kaip ‘when’, kol ‘while’, less frequently – with kada ‘when’; causal clauses are combined with the conjunction nes ‘because; since’, less frequently – with kad and kadangi ‘because’; conditional clauses are typically combined with the conjunction jeigu ‘if’, less frequently – with jei ‘if’, concessive clauses – with the conjunction nors ‘though’. The conjunctions kai ‘when’, kol ‘while’, kadangi ‘because’, jeigu and jei ‘if’ correlate with the particle tai that is very frequent in a spoken language, while the conjunction nors ‘though’ – with the contrastive conjunction bet ‘but’.In the natural language flow, the structure of adverbial sentences is modified: other sentential and discourse units can intervene between the main and the subordinate clauses, and the adverbial conjunction moves from the initial to the medial position.Traditional Lithuanian grammars emphasise that the position of adverbial clauses is undefined: they can appear before or after the main clause. However, the analysis of spontaneous speech shows that the position of a subordinate clause is influenced by the semantic relationship between the clauses. If a subordinate clause refers to a previous action or event, then it dominates in a preposition. Besides, the position of an adverbial clause is also influenced by correlative conjunctions: the main clause with the correlative particle tai dominates in the postposition.The research also revealed that Lithuanian adverbial clauses could function at the discourse level: in dialogues, the structure of a complex sentence is broken down and subordinate adverbial clauses can acquire additional – discourse – functions. Adverbial conjunctions, in their turn, can indicate relations with a previous discourse.

This paper aims to examine the meeting points between phraseology and humor research, focusing on the role and the functions of fixed phrases in humor discourse. The examples to illustrate certain aspects of usage of fixed phrases for joke purposes are taken mainly from social media such as Facebook and Twitter and include jokes in English, German, Lithuanian, Russian, and Polish. In the course of the investigation, a distinction ought to be made between set phrases (idioms in the narrower sense of the term, proverbs, catch phrases etc.) and fixed phrases in general. Set phrases (phrasemes) have an “added value” regarding their meaning – be it a figurative element, be it ready-made reasoning or behavioral models in short form in the case of adages. In humor discourse idioms – and proverbs – are used mainly for wordplay, in which both the literal and the idiomatic meaning are activated. The wordplay can happen also in verse form. Adages can be transformed or twisted resulting in new parodistic or funny sayings. Fixed phrases outside of the phraseology can be separated into two groups: phrases typical for a particular discourse type and joke frame related phrases. The former, as means to evoke a certain frame, are used in parodistic jokes (e.g., the phrase ladies if he evokes the dating tips frame). The latter constitute a distinct class of fixed phrases which can be found only in the humor discourse: these phrases act as joke formulae und provide a basis for bigger or smaller joke categories. Certain phrases in this group, such as checks notes or nothing like deserve a mention as irony markers with a distinctive evaluative character. The shared feature of all these idiomatic and non-idiomatic phrases is that they are well-known, re-occur in the language and, in that respect, can considered belonging to the sphere of interests of phraseology. Regarding the main functions of fixed phrases in the humor discourse, they can contribute to the social play, provide the cues to switch to a nonserious humor mindset or express evaluation – from mild mockery to aggressive ridicule.

Using insights from comparative imagology the image of Vilnius in Joseph Arthur Gobineau’s novel The Pleiades (1874) has been analysed in the paper. Presumably, the name of Vilnius was first mentioned by Olympe Chodzko, his Parisian acquaintance, in her short story, its scene is laid in Vilnius. The way Vilnius is imaged depends on context. Where Vilnius is compared to the privileged Saint-Honoré quarter in Paris a tinge of phobia arises unavoidably because Vilnius in no way is comparable to Paris. Likewise is imaged Vilnius by Sophie Tonska, Marquis Candeuil’s sweetheart. Marquis Candeuil selected Vilnius for his residence from seven possible cities accidentally, by drawing lots. That attitude of the protagonist can be related to idiocracy. Where the author writes about Vilnius in the St. Petersburg-Warsaw railroad construction context his philia can be felt. Vilnius is imaged not only in this context, but also through Marquis Candeuil’s thoughts pertaining to the essential problems raised in the novel. Finally, all that reveals that the image of Vilnius in the novel, at first glance so unintentional, actually pertains to the whole system of the novel.

A controversial issue for teachers of German as a foreign language is the balance between content and form. This also applies to vocabulary work in the field of phraseology. The modeling of language competence in the communicative approach is based on the understanding of language as a means of communication. Accordingly, the primary claim of communicative language didactics is to go beyond the description of structures of the foreign language and to place appropriate, situated linguistic action at the center of teaching. Against this theoretical background, content-oriented approaches such as Task-Based Learning have emerged in foreign language didactics, which emphasize the communicative aspect of language and place the didactic emphasis on situated, authentic tasks. Nevertheless, this emphasis did not lead to the suppression of form-based approaches which consider precision in language mastery by focusing on formal aspects through exercises to be necessary and desirable.This paper examines the question of the importance of exercises and tasks in phraseology-based vocabulary work. Against the theoretical background of the approaches of Task-Based Learning (TBL) and Focus on Form (FoF), possibilities for the integration of content-oriented and form-focussing teaching concepts for the promotion of phraseological competence are shown by means of concrete examples. Furthermore, the question of their balance in teaching is discussed.

The paper aims to show some structural parallels between the concept of motion as developed by Parme-nides (5th c. BC) and the expression of the phenomena of motion in the story A Solitary Voyage to the Island Cythera by the Greek writer M.Karagatsis (1908–1960). The novelette of M.Karagatsis is interpreted as a parmenidean “motionless motion” reflexion. It is argued that M.Karagatsis’s story is structurally and essentially related to the Parmenidean poem On Nature, treating the consideration of motion as one of the impossible properties of being; and more obviously refers to certain poems by Constantine Cavafy (1863–1993), which also contain the idea of the meaninglessness of the difference between κίνησις and ἀκινησία. Thus, the concepts of κίνησις and ἀκινησία in the story by M.Karagatsis echo both the Parmenidean ideas and the Cavafy’s images of movement. Parmenides, M.Karagatsis, reception, concept of motion, metaphor, ontology.

Povilas Visinskis was a significant figure of the Lithuanian culture, society, and politics at the end of the 19th c. and the beginning of the 20th c., an active advocate of the Lithuanian national movement, a member of the national revival organisation Varpas , and a supporter of the movement to regain the banned Latin characters for the Lithuanian language. His creative legacy includes various publicistic works, found in the press or published as separate booklets; that has yet received little attention. The paper analyses some characteristic spelling and language features of publicistic works by Visinskis. Concerning the spelling, a special focus should be on its promiscuity and randomness. The principles of spelling are mixed up, different word forms are used side by side in the same text, and often it is difficult to explain the reasons and consistency of a particular spelling. With this in mind, it is rather difficult to tell which language and spelling is authentic, and which is edited, proofread or corrected by editors. At the same time, it should be pointed out that such variation in spelling is common to Lithuanian writings of that time, reflecting a phase of the developmental process of the standard language at that time. What concerns the language of Visinskis’ publicistic works, it is characterised by the use of some Samogitian features, rather frequent retention of archaic morphological forms (dual number of nouns and verbs, supinum , athematic verbs, archaic pronominal forms) and cases of stem mixing of nouns. His vocabulary is full of dialecticisms, barbarisms, and semantic archaisms. His syntax contains a lot of non-Lithuanian, foreign constructions, especially those with prepositions. In conclusion, one could say that gradually Visinskis’ language and spelling became more homogeneous. In his latest publicistic works, this language and spelling uniformity becomes clear, while particular forms and constructions are used more consistently. Keywords: Povilas Visinskis; publicistic writing; spelling; language features

Recent trends in academic discourse analysis reveal a keen scholarly interest in cross-disciplinary and cross-linguistic variation in academic texts. While most of the research is still on the English language, the last few decades have seen an upsurge of interest in academic discourse produced in other languages, frequently comparing it to patterns of writing and argumentation in Anglo-American scientific texts. Numerous studies attempt to outline the universal features of academic discourse as well as to highlight the specific ones, typical only of some of the disciplines or cultural communities. Thus, features of academic discourse are often interpreted within the “big” (i. e. national) and “small” (i. e. disciplinary) culture context (cf. Atkinson 2004). The paper briefly reviews trends in current academic discourse research, mainly in the genre of the research article. The purpose of the paper is to discuss the challenges that researchers of academic discourse face while compiling specialized comparable corpora for their cross-disciplinary and cross-linguistic analyses and to highlight certain methodological issues which are important in this type of analyses. As noted by many researchers in the field, the reliability of the results and a better empirical grounding primarily depend on the appropriately selected common ground of comparison. An overview of recently published research on cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary aspects of academic discourse reveals various methodological solutions to corpus design and data analysis.

This paper is devoted to the analysis of Osip Mandelstam’s poem “No, I will not hide from the great mess.” The poem is well-known yet remains relatively obscure and understudied, the meaning of most of its images is not clear. On the basis of motive analysis, draft versions of the poem (as analyzed by I. M. Semenko), and memoirs, a new interpretation is proposed: the addressee and the antagonist of the poem is Anna Akhmatova. The lyrical hero of the poem rides in a tram in the 1930s and painfully recalls the trips on a carriage with Akhmatova in 1917–1918. This interpretation allows to clarify the semantics of all the elements of the poem: its desperate and “rippling” intonation, the motive of the carriage driver, the motive of the game, the image of the “whore,” the comparison with a sparrow, etc. All of these images have a biographical connotation, related to Mandelstam’s relationship with Akhmatova.

This article, based on the paper read at Colloquium Balticum XI Lundense (Lund, November 8–10, 2012), focuses on the discussion of the function of the phrase eu phronein, and especially its participial variant eu phronountes, as one of the key expressions denoting the praiseworthy and commendable persons, distinguished by their wisdom and mental health, in the texts of Isocrates. The paper aims to delineate the semantic aspects of this phrase while briefly discussing its location, etymology, closest equivalents, context and content (the system of features and functions). The discussion is based on the preliminary analysis of about 50 episodes of the epideictic discourses of Isocrates, where the mentioned phrase itself or synonymous and antonymous expressions appear. The article summarizes the main points of the results of that (early) stage of our research (including the discovery of similarity between or even almost equivalent meaning of certain concepts and phrases, e.g. eu phronein and noun ekhein, as well as their opposites) and provides a concise systematic picture of both the contents of the phrase itself and the methods of its textual application. Conclusions that are made at the end of the article help to see more clearly the interrelation among various concepts of mental activities in Isocratean oeuvre and to discover the subtlety of the Isocratean style. This paper shows that the concept of eu phronountes (as well as its semantic substitute noun ekhontes) is very similar in its meaning to the concepts of sophoi, phronimoi, pepaideumenoi. Having its origin in early epic and frequent use in dramatic poetry, the concept may be regarded as a key phrase distinguishing Isocratean style and his selection of topics from his contemporary prosaic writers who have used it considerably less frequently than Isocrates. The contextual analysis and synthetic picture of various ethical features, wise decisions or advices, attributed to eu phronountes, reveal their double-sided identity: on the one hand, eu phronountes are very flexible and apparently free in their thoughts, speech and actions, ready for challenges of life and ready to help others, on the other hand, they are dependent on certain definite tasks and rules of behavior and judgement (ascribed to them). These features make them seem to be a kind of a new literary hero, created by the speech-writer not only for the rhetorical purpose (as a well-known stylistic device facilitating the argumentation and attested in Aristotleʼs Rhetoric), but also for the promotion of his own ideas and allusive advisory messages addressed to his contemporary audience. When seen as a reflection of the worldview of the author (or the main literary speaker of Isocratean discourses), the concept could be estimated as an important standpoint for the later Aristotelian concept of phronesis, and hence, for the modern „phronetic dimension“ of the variety of approaches to the phenomena of nowadays life.

Intertextuality, or the link between two texts, has long been recognized as a very important part of research writing. Citations in particular have attracted much attention both from applied linguists and from bibliometricians. Citation indexes have now become an inseparable part of research evaluation which, in its turn, plays the key role in research funding. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that evaluation based on citation indexes as the main criteria for financing and scientific awards has received a widespread dissatisfaction, primarily because it often fails to take into account the breadth and variety of disciplinary approaches. In order to shed light on citation practices and their suitability for research evaluation, scientists have been approaching citations from both scientometric and linguistic perspectives. Much has been done in the field, including research on self-citation and its impact on citation indexes, a variety of attempts to classify citations, sentiment analysis for citation polarity and automatic citation strength estimation, inter alia. Most of these works, however, are based on data from one discipline or compare two clearly contrasting science areas, such as the so called “hard” and “soft” sciences. There are far less studies that offer an indepth view of how citation works in closer disciplines as well as in research cultures other than English. Based on two PhD dissertations written by Lithuanian young scholars in sociology and cultural studies, this paper analyzes a variety of quantitative and qualitative citation aspects, such as citation density, year of publication and its type, integral/non integral distinction, level of detail, number of citations at one reference point, type & token ratio adapted to citations, the distribution of citations in theoretical and practical parts of the dissertations. The results reveal clear disciplinary differences in the use of citation. The cultural studies dissertation uses more direct quotes than the sociology dissertation, with integral references dominating and thus allowing to place more emphasis on the cited author rather than on the information. Conversely, non-integral referencing prevails in the sociology dissertation with less detailed reference to sources used. Books are the most popular type of reference source in the cultural studies dissertation, while the sociology dissertation relies more on research articles. If automatized, the analytical model adopted in this paper could serve as a fast and useful tool for the initial evaluation of student papers, research articles submitted to research journals, etc. The citation patters of a new work can be matched against prevailing citation trends in the discipline and reveal how adequately the new work is embedded in literature.

The author of the article presents a structural analysis of the Homeric Hymns. Drawing on the results of a research based upon a quantitative approach, that is, calculation of various formal textual parameters sup­plemented by a qualitative interpretation of achieved results, he discusses the structural features of the cor­pus of the Homeric Hymns as a textual whole, the distribution of the hymns according to the dedica­tions attached to them, i. e. according to their divine or heroic addressee, and the structural framework of the hymns of different length.First of all, in the first chapter of the article, which serves as an introduction to the investigative part of this paper (the presentation of the results of the research proper), the author briefly discusses the historical process of the formation of the Hymns’ corpus and some other textological issues relevant to the ensuing research.After that, in the second chapter of the article, the author focuses on the compositional structure of the whole corpus of the Homeric Hymns, suggesting a hypothetical scheme of dividing the overall narra­tive sequence of the whole corpus of the Homeric Hymns into eight sequential groups. It is argued that each of these sequential groups has a unity of its own,which might be described in terms of both form and content. Special attention is given to the admira­bly smooth transition from almost any one sequential group to the next one.In the third chapter, the author discusses the distribution of the Hymns according to their dedication, i. e. according to their divine or heroic addressee. Presenting an interpretation of the quantitative re­sults arrived at in this chapter, the author suggests some possible answers (or, rather, only some clues) as to why some ancient Greek deities are given in the Homeric Hymns much more attention than oth­ers (for example, why some especially prominent Greek gods, say, Zeus, Poseidon, or Hades, are made to stand in the shadow of some subordinate or even minor, if not marginal, deities).In the fourth chapter of the article, the author focuses on the structural framework of typical indi­vidual hymns of different length. During this stage of the research, the author posits five typical groups of the hymns according to their length and briefly dis­cusses the specific features of the hymns belonging to these five groups in terms of their form, content, and a correlation between their form and content.At the end of the article, the conclusion is made that some kind of a quantitative approach to the Ho­meric Hymns, for example, such as presented in this paper, if correctly conducted and creatively interpret­ed, might present us valuable fresh insights into the structural nature of the corpus of the Homeric Hymns as a whole, as well as shed some light on the prob­lems of the structure of individual hymns. As a con­sequence of these deeper insights, we find ourselves in a situation where we should abandon all talk about the so-called structural chaos of the Homeric Hymns.

The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate the necessity of distinguishing a semantic-functional class of stance adverbials in Lithuanian. Following Biber et al. (1999) and Hasselgård (2010) an attempt is made to show that alongside circumstance adverbials there are also linking adverbials and stance adverbials in Lithuanian. The means of realization of stance adverbials in Lithuanian is not only adverbs but also so called modal words (galbūt ‘maybe’, tikriausiai ‘most probably’), various particles (taigi ‘therefore’, visgi ‘still’, ‘nevertheless’), CTPs (manoma ‘it is believed’, natūralu ‘naturally’), various adverbial clauses (kaip matyti ‘as it is seen, as one can see’, kaip žinoma ‘as is known’) but also prepositional phrases (pasak X ‘according to X’). The article devotes much attention to the semantic classification of the basic types of stance adverbials, which has been illustrated by the language data collected from the Corpus of Academic Lithuanian (Corpus Academicum Lithuanicum – CorALit – http://coralit.lt). The paper also touches upon the process of adverbialization and its relationship to grammaticalization which presupposes the desemanticization and (inter)subjectivization of the linguistic expressions under analysis. Many Lithuanian verbal and adjectival CTPs like žinoma ‘it is known’, suprantama ‘it is understood’, tarkim ‘let’s say’ can develop into stance adverbials and further into discourse markers by losing any links to the original lexical meaning of the verb they have evolved from. ------ Straipsnio tikslas parodyti, kodėl reikėtų ir kodėl galima būtų skirti semantinę-funkcinę adverbialų klasę lietuvių kalboje. Pastaroji nėra tapatinama su prieveiksmiais kaip tradicine kalbos dalimi gramatikoje ar aplinkybėmis kaip tradicine sakinio dalimi sintaksėje. Be to, nėra kvestionuojamas aptariamų kalbos reiškinių statusas kalbos dalių ar sakinio dalių požiūriu. Siūloma atkreipti dėmesį į kalboje objektyviai egzistuojančią straipsnyje aptariamų raiškos priemonių aiškinimo įvairovę. Jų semantinė-funkcinė charakteristika netelpa į prieveiksmių (DLKG 1996, 422-429; Valeckienė 1998, 169-170), aplinkybių (DLKG 1996, 527-553; Valeckienė 1998, 55-66) bei modifikuojamųjų dalelyčių (Valeckienė 1998, 191) reikšmių ir tipų klasifikaciją. Šios semantinės-funkcinės klasės aptarimas remiasi autoriaus pozicijos raiškos tyrimu lietuvių mokslo kalboje1. Visi kalbos duomenys surinkti iš Lietuvių mokslo kalbos tekstyno (Corpus Academicum Lithuanicum: http://coralit.lt/). Darbe trumpai apžvelgiami akademinio diskurso ypatumai ir autoriaus pozicijos vaidmuo užmezgant ir plėtojant dialogą su skaitytoju. Epizodiškai gretinami adverbialinių autoriaus pozicijos sąvokos apimties ir jos raiškos būdų ypatumai kitose kalbose. Pateikiama autoriaus pozicijos adverbialų semantinė klasifikacija ir jų raiškos priemonių įvairovė. Labai trumpai aptariama adverbializacijos proceso esmė ir jo sąsajos su gramatikalizacija bei intersubjektyvumu.

The paper analyses the poetry of Czesław Miłosz as a field of intersubjective relationships, referring to the aesthetics of Mikhail Bakhtin. In the collection “Oca­lenie” (1945), the subject is viewed as a mediator, and this is more fully elaborated in the later poetical works of Miłosz. Various ways of expressing the subject “I” as the mediator actualize its problematic status and intersubjective relationships, its dialogue with the ot­her characters of other poetical texts. Poetical charac­ters differ in either being dead (and thus existing only in memory related with biographical texts) or acting in another world (God and Daemonion). The subject gives voice to characters of the other world and in this way becomes a mediator. A specific emphasis is given to the concept of Daemonion. The paper ana­lyses different texts in which this image appears, and morphs. A question arises whether Daemonion is a character, or whether it is related to the complicated issue of form and content. To conclude, Daemonion appearing in poetry is the form itself. Also presented are various forms of the expressed subject (subject-witness, subject-chronicler, subject-shaman), which are related to the changing poetry, and the visual development of the characters.

LITHUANIAN GAUTI (‘GET’) AND TEKTI (‘BE GOTTEN’): ASPECTS OF GRAMMATICALIZATIONSummaryThe paper deals with the Lithuanian get-verbs gauti (‘get’) and tekti (‘be gotten’) within the framework of grammaticalization. The purpose of the paper is to analyze semantic as well as morphosyntactic properties of the verbs under the study and to disclose their tendencies towards grammaticalization. Following the point of view that the very beginning of the process of grammaticalization is in the context of a particular construction the focus of the paper is on the constructional patterns in which the verbs gauti (‘get’) and tekti (‘be gotten’) appear and on the basic types of complements of the verbs. Since frequency is considered to be an important indicator of grammaticalization, the paper looks at the quantitative distribution of basic structural types of complements used with the Lithuanian get-verbs under analysis. Besides, types of modal meanings which gauti (‘get’) and tekti (‘be gotten’) denote are analyzed as well.The Lithuanian verbs gauti (‘get’) and tekti (‘be gotten’) express an ingressive aspect of possession, i.e. onset of possession or acquisition. As lexical verbs with the meaning of acquisition the Lithuanian get-verbs are found in the constructional patterns with NP as their grammatical object. When the noun possessed denotes a concrete entity, the verbs have the meaning of concrete acquisition, and when the noun denotes an abstract entity, the verbs express an abstract acquisition. Both verbs gauti (‘get’) and tekti (‘be gotten’) more often tend to express abstract acquisition. However, there are some differences in the possibilities of expressing the lexical meaning of acquisition: only the verb gauti (‘get’) most frequently functions as the full lexical verb and the verb tekti (‘be gotten’), in contrast, functions as the modal verb.Modal meanings of the Lithuanian get-verbs are expressed by the constructions with an infinitival complement (INF). Both of the verbs gauti (‘get’) and tekti (‘be gotten’) denote non-epistemic necessity and non-epistemic possibility. However, the meaning of non-epistemic possibility seems to be very peripheral for the Lithuanian get-verbs. It is worth to notice that the modal verb tekti (‘be gotten’), besides its modal meanings, in certain contexts tend to mark aspectual meaning of perfectivity. However, the conclusion about the status of the verb tekti (‘be gotten’) as an aspectual marker requires further analysis.

LEXICAL “DIVERGENCE” AND “CONVERGENCE” BETWEEN BALTIC AND SLAVIC LANGUAGES: A STATISTIC ANALYSIS OF MATERIALS IN R. TRAUTMANN'S DICTIONARYSummaryAs far as a clear answer has not been given with respect to the theory of “Balto-slavic lin­guistic unity”, apparent similarities in lexemes between these two linguistic groups should be exa­mined in comparison with those among other linguistic groups.This paper is an attemp to show the “degrees” of similarities in the lexemes between Baltic and Slavic languages in a statistic manner. For this purpose, lexical materials are taken from R. Trautmann's Dictionary (1923), and the analysis is based on two notions of “divergence” and “convergence”.On the basis of all the items in the Dictionary, the author of this paper distinguishes some groups of items in terms of their distributions. First, he draws a dividing line between the “convergence” type and the “divergence” type, the latter of which turns out to consist of three sub-types (D-1, D-2 and D-3). Then he regards the items of the “convergence” type as the “candidates” of the “Balto-Slavic lexemes” with the highest degree of commonness. The author finds in the Dictionary a group of 83 independent items on one hand, and a group of 10 deriva­tive items on the other, which are both considered to belong to the “convergence” type.From the author's point of view, other groups of items are, more or less, ranked in the peripheral position with respect to those “central” two groups of items.

Straipsnyje siekiama atskleisti kai kurių iš pagrindinių mitologinių baltų-suomių epų herojų baltiškas šaknis. Analizuojama mitologinių personažų vardų kilmė. Panu (saulės sūnus), kuris yra vienas svarbiausių Kalevalos herojų, vardas kildintinas iš baltų *panu >prūsų panno ‘ugnis’. Salme (saulės dukra), tiksliai atitinka latvių Saules meita ir lietuvių Saulės duktė. Tapio (miško dievas) baltiškasis prototipas gali būti atpažįstamas prūsų toponime Tapio, kilusiame iš prūsiškos šaknies *tapja- ‘šiltas’, kuri neišlikusi kitose baltų kalbose. Ukko – aukščiausia dievybė suomių panteone, griaustinio ir oro dievas ir jo estiškasis kolega Uku, kuris taip pat užima aukščiausią vietą estiškoje dievų hierarchijoje, apibūdinami epitetais „aukštas“ ir „aukščiausias“, kurie leidžia atpažinti baltų superliatyvinį priešdėlį *uka- >prūsų ucka-, išreiškiantį aukščiausią daikto ar dalyko laipsnį, užkoduotą ir vyriausiojo prūsiškojo panteono dievo Occopirmus varde. Straipsnyje, remiantis šaltiniais, išnagrinėti keturi baltų-suomių epų teonimai, kurie atstovauja svarbiausiems mitologiniams personažams. Trimis atvejais iš keturių baltiškasis substratas perėjo tik į prūsų kalbą; remiantis šiuo faktu tiesioginį kontaktą istoriniame laike reikia atmesti. Kita vertus, vardų ir jų funkcijų bei motyvų perėmimas liudija intensyvius kontaktus ikiistoriniais laikais. The paper seeks to reveal the Baltic origin of the heroes of some of the main mythological Baltic-Finnish epics. The origin of the names of mythological characters is analysed. The name of Panu (the son of Sun), who is one of the main characters of “The Kalevala”, is supposed to have originated from Baltic *panu >Prussian panno [fire]. Salme (the daughter of Sun) corresponds to Latvian Saules meita and Lithuanian Saulės duktė [the daughter of Sun]. The Baltic prototype of Tapio (the god of woods) might be recognised in Prussian toponym Tapio, which originated from the Prussian root *tapja- [warm], which has not survived in other Baltic languages. Ukko – the highest deity in the Finnish pantheon, the god of thunder and air, and his Estonian counterpart Uku, who also occupies the top position in the Estonian hierarchy of gods, are described by epithets “tall” and “tallest” that allow identifying the Baltic superlative prefix *uka- >Prussian ucka-, denoting the highest degree, which is encoded in the name of Occopirmus, the supreme Prussian god. Based on sources, the paper analyses four theonyms from Baltic-Finnish epics, which represent the most important mythological characters. In three out of four cases the Baltic substratum moves only to the Prussian language, thus the direct contact in the historical time should be rejected. On the other hand, the transfer of names and their functions as well as motifs testify intensive contacts in prehistoric times.

ABOUT THE POSSIBLE ANCIENT CZECH-BALTIC LEXICAL CONNECTIONSSummaryThe paper deals with the ancient (up to the 13th century A. D.) Czech–Baltic lexical correspondences. The West Balts are supposed to penetrate into Moravia and the territory of the middle Danube. Probably they were the Galinds, that at the turn of the two eras moved from South Prussia, their homeland, to the South and split into two branches in the territory of Volyn. Accord­ing to the data of onomastics and toponymies, one of the branches settled near the Czech–Polish boundary, another moved to Podmoskovye. Here follows the enumeratien of the Czech lexemes touched upon in the paper and having the Baltic (and some of them also Russian) correspondences:Klábositi ‘to chat, to talk nonsense’, lebediti se ‘to be in bliss, luxuriate’, třměti ‘to reel’, baracht(a) ‘chatter, babble’, klopýtati‘to stumble, to stagger along’, hárati se‘to heat (about cow)’, harhule ‘growth on a tree, excrescence’, batoliti se ‘waddle’, šklebit ‘to light dimly’, kobrtati ‘to stumble’, drobiti ‘to feel feverish, to shiver’, rozblptati ‘to be boiled to pulp’, duznit ‘to bang one’s back’, obočí ‘eyebow’, duněti ‘to rattle’, žíně ‘a special rope for climbing to a beehive on a tree’, těpiti ‘to carry’, řije ‘period if heat of deers’.

Lithuanian secondary verbs based on present stems in ‑staSummaryLithuanian has a number of deverbative formations which are clearly based on present stems, cf.: ded‑ẽklė ‘good layer (about hens)’ : dẽd‑a ‘lays’, dúod‑ingas ‘open‑handed, generous’, duod‑imas ‘giving’ : dúod‑a ‘gives’, verd‑ẽnė ‘spring’ : vérd‑a ‘boils’, es‑ìmas ‘being’ : es‑ù ‘I am’, ẽs‑ti ‘it is’, tek‑ìmas ‘rising (of the sun)’ : tẽk‑a ‘flows, runs; rises (the sun)’ (beside tekė́ti, ‑ė́jo and tekė́jimas), lim̃p‑alas ‘sticky material’ : li‑m̃‑p‑a ‘sticks’, skrand‑nùs ‘good flyer’ : skre‑ñ‑d‑a ‘flies’, kánk‑inti(s) ‘to give enough, to satisfy’ : (pa)ka‑ñ‑k‑a ‘suffices’, té‑n‑k‑inti ‘to satisfy’ : (už)te‑ñ‑k‑a ‘suffices’, trunk‑imas ‘delaying’ : tru‑ñ‑k‑a ‘lasts, delays’, etc. (Būga 1959, 446; Urbutis 1978, 191, 197; Ambrazas 1993, 21‑25).This paper presents examples of Lithuanian secondary verbs based on present stems in ‑sta, cf. pýkst‑auti ‘to be angry’ : pỹkst‑a ‘is angry’. These formations represent a rare (archaic?) derivational process and they can be used to support the hypothesis of the deverbative origin of suffix ‑styti (Latvian ‑stīt). The proponents of this hypothesis believe that present stems in ‑sta provided bases for some formations in ‑yti (‑o, ‑ė) which were later resegmented and gave rise to new suffix ‑styti (‑sto, ‑stė), cf.: lankst‑ýti : liñkst‑a → lank‑stýti : leñk‑ti (Ul’janov 1888, 210; Leumann 1942, 125; Vaillant 1966, 364; Smoczyński 1987, 203). On the other hand, the data presented in this paper still do not exclude the possibility of denominal origin of ‑styti (Leskien 1884, 443; Johanson 1893, 502; Endzelin 1922, 641; Skardžius 1943, 538; Stang 1942, 149; cf. Jasanoff 2003, 141).All material was excerpted from the electronic edition of “Lietuvių kalbos žodynas” (http://www.lkz.lt) and arranged according to suffixes.The class of verbs in ‑auti has 8 formations which are based on the stems in ‑sta: blė́stauti ‘to burn lightly, to be burning down’ : blė́sta ‘burns down’, nubostauti ‘to ask for something in a bothersome way’ : nubósta ‘gets bored, becomes boring’, nerimstauti ‘to be bored, to wander’ : nerìmsta ‘is not calm’, nirštauti ‘to be (slightly) angry’ : nir̃šta ‘is angry, rages’, pýkstauti ‘to be angry’ : pỹksta ‘is angry’, širstauti ‘to rage’ : šir̃sta ‘rages’, trókštauti ‘to desire’ : trókšta ‘desires’, vargstáuti ‘to live in trouble, to have difficulties’ : var̃gsta ‘lives in poverty, takes trouble’.The class in ‑enti provides 3 examples: birsténti ‘to scatter, to strew (slightly)’ : (dialectal) bìrsta ‘pours out (intr.)’ (therefore, the formation is causative), blėsténti ‘to burn slightly, to go out’ : blė́sta ‘burns down’, rūksténti ‘to emit smoke little by little’ : rū̃ksta ‘emits smoke’.The formations in ‑ėti based on the stems in ‑sta are the following: drįstė́ti, ‑ė́ja ‘to dare’ : drį̃sta ‘dares’, numirštė́ti, ‑ė́ja ‘to die (about animals)’ : numìršta ‘dies’, plū́stėti, plū́sta ‘to talk nonsense’ : plū́sta ‘talks nonsense’, rūkstė́ti, ‑ė́ja ‘to emit smoke’ : rū̃ksta ‘emits smoke’, smilkstė́ti, smil̃ksta ‘to burn without fire, to smoulder’ : smil̃ksta ‘smoulders’, spurstė́ti, spùrsta ‘to flounder’ : spùrsta ‘flounders’, várgstėti, ‑ėja ‘to live in trouble, to have difficulties’ : var̃gst‑a ‘lives in poverty, takes trouble’. It is possible that in some cases the verbs were not really derived, but rather reshaped according to the model of tekė́ti, tẽka (the inflectional stems in ‑st‑(a) became lexical), e. g. tẽk‑a : smil̃kst‑a, tek‑ė́‑ti, ‑ė́jo : x, x = smilkst‑ė́‑ti, ‑ė́‑jo. A number of similar remodelings or derivations are also based on 3 person athematic forms reinterpreted as the members of i stem paradigms, cf.: susičiáustėti, ‑i ‘to cough’ : susičiáust‑i ‘coughs’, ráustėti, ‑ėja ‘to weep’ : ráust‑i ‘weeps’, prisérgstėti, ‑ėja ‘to watch over, to guard’ : prisérgst‑i ‘watches over, guards’.The class in ‑inėti provides 6 formations directly derived from the stems in ‑sta: dilbstinė́ti ‘to loiter, to hang around’ : dil̃bsta ‘loiters’, dygstinė́ti ‘to shoot, to start to grow little by little’ : dýgsta ‘starts to grow’, mirštinė́ti ‘to die constantly (about a moderate number of deaths occurring during a certain period of time)’ : mìršta ‘dies’, plūstinė́ti ‘to wander’ : plū́sta ‘wanders’, snūstinė́ti ‘to walk sleepy’ : snū́sta ‘snoozes’, virstinė́ti ‘to fall down repeatedly, to sway’ : vir̃sta ‘falls down’.The class in -inti has 4 verbs based on the stems in -sta: bìrstinti ‘to scatter, to strew (slightly)’ : (dialectal) bìrsta ‘pours out (intr.)’, ìlgstinti ‘to linger, to delay’ : ìlgsta ‘becomes long’, pùrstintis ‘to put on airs’ : pur̃sta ‘swells’, virstinti ‘to come swaying’ : vir̃sta ‘falls down’. One should note that at least two formations are causative (bìrstinti and pùrstinti).The formations in ‑yti possibly based on the stems in ‑sta are the following: džiáustyti ‘to dry (trans.)’ : džiū́sta ‘dries (intr.)’ (cf. iterative džiáustyti ‘to hang out to dry’ : džiáuti ‘idem’), gąstýtis ‘to be afraid’ : gą̃sta ‘becomes frightened’, gramstýti ‘to plunge (repeatedly)’ : grim̃zta ‘sinks, plunges’, ilgstytis ‘to become long’ : ìlgsta ‘becomes long’, raibstytis ‘to be dazzled’ : raĩbsta ‘is dazzled’, (ne)įrìmstyti (‑ija) ‘(not) to calm down (intr.)’ : nerìmsta ‘is not calm’, nurìmstyti ‘to calm down (trans.)’ : nurìmsta ‘calms down’, slū́gstyti ‘to make (swelling) go down’ : slū́gsta ‘(swelling) goes down’, svaigstytis ‘to wander’ : svaĩgsta ‘to start feeling dizzy, to become delirious’. A number of these verbs can also be simple derivations in ‑styti, but at least causative cases (džiáustyti, nurìmstyti, slū́gstyti) are more reliable examples as this meaning is not typical for the formations in ‑styti.There are no good examples of verbs in ‑oti which could be based on the present stems in ‑sta. However, one should note that there is a small group of verbs which seem to have an independent suffix ‑stoti, ‑stoja, cf. išėstóti (the present stem is not attested) ‘to wipe out’ : (iš)ė́sti, ė́da, ė́dė ‘to eat away’; laipstoti, ‑oja ‘to climb, to fly (repeatedly)’ : lìpti, lìpa, lìpo ‘to climb’, lakstóti, ‑ója ‘to fly about’ : lė̃kti, lẽkia, lė̃kė ‘to fly’, užžirstóti (the present stem is not attested) ‘to become covered by falling particles’ : (už)žìrti (žir̃ti), žỹra (also žìrsta), žìro ‘to fall, to scatter’. These examples could reflect a well known variation of present (factitive and iterative) stems in *‑ā and *‑āja (cf. Lith. mė́tyti, mė́to beside mė́toti, mė́toja (rare), Latv. mę̃tât, mę̃tãju, OCS mětati, mětajǫ, Lith. statýti, stãto : statùs (stãtas) beside bjaurója : bjaurùs (bjaũras)).There are 2 formations in ‑uoti which can be directly related to the base stems in ‑sta: ilgstuoti ‘to linger, to delay’ : ìlgsta ‘becomes long’, linkstúoti ‘to bend (intr.)’ : liñksta ‘bends’.

ON THE AREA—TYPOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE BALTIC ORIGIN WORDS IN BYELORUSSIAN DIALECTS Summary The paper deals with the area—typological characteristics of the words of Baltic origin, func­tioning in Byelorussian dialects. It concerns the zones of functioning of the words of Baltic ori­gin on the linguistic map of Byelorussia, taking into account the degree of their concentration (strong, intermediate, weak). Considering the role of the words of Baltic origin in the lexical system of Byelorussian dialects, the main types are distinguished, namely: (1) the words of Baltic origin comprising all the dialect areas of Byelorussia; (2) the words of Baltic origin used in some group of dialects generally in the neighbouring areas; (3) the words of Baltic origin concentrated in the dialects of the north-western part of Byelorussia. Besides, the paper describes the types of areas characteristic of the Baltic origin words in Bye­lorussian dialects.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY EAST LITHUANIAN LITERARY LANGUAGE, ITS RISE AND DISAPPEARANCESummaryThe Old Lithuanian literary records of the 16th and 17th centuries indicate the existence of three variants of literary Lithuanian at that time. An early literary variant based on the local West High Lithuanian dialect arose on the territory of Eastern Prussia (now the Kaliningrad District). Two literary languages developed on the territory of the Great Dukedom of Lithuania — Central Lithuanian (on the basis of the dialect of Kėdainiai environs) and Eastern Lithuanian. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the origin and fate of literary Eastern Lithuanian.A short characteristic of Eastern Lithuanian and a review of some attempts to establish its dialect background are followed by a detailed analysis of specific Eastern Lithuanian features and a conclusion is drawn that the town koine of Vilnius — the capital of the Great Dukedom of Lithuania served the basis for the formation of literary Eastern Lithuanian.The following features are of importance in accepting Vilnius as the centre of literary Eastern Lithuanian:the presence of ō in all positions, peculiar to the environs of Vilnius and quite alien to many present-day Eastern Lithuanian dialects, which have preserved an older pronunciation (ā or ) esp. in unstressed positions;the presence of doublet forms with tautosyllabic combinations of the an type, indicating the proximity of the literary record to the an‖un isophone, which actually ran about 10—15 kilometres to the South-West of Vilnius;the presence of sporadic cases of the Dzūkai change of t, d into c, dz; its isophone ran to the East of Vilnius;the presence of pronoun forms of three types. 1) Nom. Sg. fern, tó (=present-day tà), 2) the same case form tój, 3) Nom. PI. masc. tíej, Instr. Sg. mase. túoj, fem. tj > tų́j (=present-day lite­rary tiẽ, tuõ, tà); the contact area of these forms is just the environs of Vilnius;the presence of the 3d pers. Present tense forms without the ending -i (mýl side by side withmýli);sporadic monophthongization of ai, ei into a, e in kaĩp, teĩp, šiaĩp;sporadic spelling ey for the diphthong ai, indicating the weakened („Eastern Lithuanian”) pronunciation of the first component of the diphthong, typical of the dialects to the North of Vilnius.There are also other numerous linguo-geographical factors, supporting the above-mentioned localization of literary Eastern Lithuanian. On the other hand, no data contradicting such a hypothesis have been found in the literary records.In the paper the rise of the literary language on the basis of the Vilnius koine is substantiated by historical arguments as well; resp. a complicated linguistic situation of the 14th— 16th centuries in the Great Dukedom of Lithuania is subjected to an analysis. The importance of the literary language under investigation for the entire Lithuanian linguistic culture is established.On the basis of the dialectological analysis of the written records of later centuries a conclu­sion is drawn that literary East Lithuanian ceased to exist early in the 18th century in connection with the increased Polonization of the Lithuanian town aristocracy.

The status of the boundary that separates and connects the different spheres of existence and the possibility of crossing this boundary (transgression) are the subject of many studies in different fields of the humanities. Transgression is also closely linked to the question of the relationship between reality and fiction; consequently, it can be considered as one of the fundamental problems of literary theory.It is exactly the incompleteness and theoretical openness of the literary work and the permeability of reality and fiction that the motto of L. Ulitskaya’s novel Jacob’s Ladder takes as its theme, thus directing the reader’s attention to the acts of crossing boundaries in the work.In this paper, I examine the various sources of transgression; on the one hand, in the course of the heroine’s life, and on the other hand, in relation to the different semiotic systems that open up within the plot.

Carnivalisation in literary prose has been gaining prominence both in Lithuanian and German literature. The present paper compares two novels, namely, Johannisnacht by Uwe Timm (1996) and Lietuvis Vilniuje by Herkus Kunčius (2011), related not merely through their themes of current affairs and reflections of the past, but also through poetics which continues the tradition of Carnivalesque. Although the two authors represent distinctly different cultural and literary backgrounds of two countries (West Germany and Lithuania), the novels transcend to a common intercultural space by their similar narrative strategies and carnivalised worldview.

The dialectological and sociolinguistic material from the Southern Aukštaitian borderland is under the investigation in this article. The most recent records of the speaker of the Lithuanian Southern Aukštaitian in Šalčininkai district are analyzed in order to study the changes in the syntax. The peripheral area of the Southern Aukštaitian located in Šalčininkai district is surrounded or, speaking more precisely, in contact with languages other than Lithuanian, i. e. Belarusian and Polish, and relatively recently with the Russian language as well. The purpose of this article is to reveal the process of interception and convergence of syntactic compounds in the Lithuanian dialect of Šalčininkai district. The paper is based on ideas by Vytautas Ambrazas (2006) on this topic.Because of continuous language contact a lot of variants in the present Lithuanian dialect of Šalčininkai region have developed. For example, very frequently the prepositions ant ‘on’, dėl ‘for’, į ‘to’, po ‘after’ used in combination with case tend to acquire more specific meanings. A lot of them become analogous to those found in the neighbouring Slavic languages and thus are often alien for Lithuanian. The impact of standard Lithuanian cannot be totally disregarded either.The Lithuanian and Slavic languages are in active contact in these neighbourhoods, that is’ why they tend to develop the same patterns and constructions. In many cases the local Belarusian dialect, known as the poprostu (‘plain language’ – a local variant of the Belarusian northwestern dialect), plays a stimulating role here. Relatively recently all three contact languages, i.e. Lithuanian, Belarusian and Polish, have acquired numerous lexical and grammatical borrowings in the dialects of Šalčininkai neighborhoods. This is one of the conditions for accelerating the incorporation and adoption of alien syntactic patterns in the Lithuanian language.In intense contact, borrowing is not limited to several different patterns because syntactic rules could be adopted as well. Surely, the archaic constructions could acquire entirely new semantic content. The prepositional phrases have been adopted and used not instead of pure cases, but rather alongside with them.

In Aischylos’ Eumenides, Apollo intimates a theory according to which the father is the sole genetic parent of the child. The status of this conception, and whether it is depicted as an outlandish idea, has been much and inconclusively discussed. This paper considers a neglected piece of evidence: Apollo’s use of the very unusual word αὐτάδελφον when addressing Hermes. In light of the Greeks’ awareness of this etymology as well as the other instances of this rare word in tragedy, the author argues that Aischylos’ text highlights the etymological connection to δελφύς, the womb, thus evoking the role of the mother. This suggests that Aischylos subtly lets his, and Apollo’s, language rebel against the notion of merely paternal kinship, and the concomitant ideas about revenge, retaliation and children’s obligations to their parent.

The curiosity about toy-like objects in contemporary Anglophone literature, while part of a millennia-long human fascination with artificial life, also squares palpably with the material shift that took place in the humanities in the 1980s, reinvigorating the fields of history, anthropology, philosophy, and literature with a new concern for the world of things and material culture. The present paper employs the critical lens of the New Materialism, Thing Theory, and phenomenological reasoning to examine the tropological significance of sapient objects – both organic and man-made – in English author Jessie Burton’s historical novel The Miniaturist (2014). By highlighting the ways in which the narrative’s figural system negotiates the structural and conceptual dichotomies of human/doll, object/thing, interiority/exteriority, authenticity/artificiality, and mobility/stasis, this reading of Burton’s novel attempts to show how the literary text rethinks the social life of things and the ambiguity of subject-object relations in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. A critical emphasis on the fluidity of matter in The Miniaturist brings to light the invisible boundaries of human agency and the role of commodity capitalism in the genesis of modern subjectivity.

In this paper I describe the semantics, pragmatics and the discourse functions of three Lithuanian agent-defocusing constructions, featuring the non-referential use of second person singular/third person verbal forms and the non-agreeing participial forms in ma/ta. These three constructions can all be defined as impersonal, in the broader sense of the word, as the agent (or the main participant, whatever its semantic role may be) is constructed as non-referential: I label them 2sg-imp, 3-imp and ma/ta-imp. My corpus consists of original Lithuanian texts (a short story and entries on an Internet forum) and of the Lithuanian translations of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella Le Petit Prince and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. My analysis shows that 2sg-imp are preferably used to express generic agents (anyone) and 3-imp are preferably used to express referential indefinite agents (someone). while ma/ta-imp are referentially flexible. 2sg-imp are pragmatically marked in that they are used to express empathy between the speaker and the pool of potential referents; they are mostly used in specific discourse types, such as opinion statements and life drama situations. 3-imp are preferred in situations where the indefiniteness of the agent is relevant to the development of the narrative; ma/ta-imp are instead preferred when the agent is irrelevant, and the focus is on the event itself. The behavior of Lithuanian 2sg-imp, 3-imp and ma/ta-imp is consistent with the one already described for similar constructions in other European languages.

Dažnai manoma, kad indoeuropiečių ablautas, vartojamas kaip submorfema kartu su kitomis morfemomis, laikui bėgant linksta išnykti atskirų indoeuropiečių kalbų istorijoje. Kita vertus, kai kurių mokslininkų manyta, kad ablautas dažnai būna toks produktyvus, kad skverbiasi į kategorijas, kurios pradžioje jo neturėjo. Literatūroje abi teorijos turi savo šalininkų, pirmoji – Mańczaką (1958), antroji - Kuryłowiczių (1947). Šiame straipsnyje, skiriamame prof. Wojciechui Smoczyńskiui, minėtoji diskusija aptariama iliustruojant ją baltų kalbų pavyzdžiais. It is often assumed that PIE ablaut, used as a sub-morpheme accompanying other morphemes, tends to recede over time in the history of the individual Indo-European languages. On the other hand, it has been argued by some scholars that ablaut is often productive enough to expand over categories that did not have it originally. Both positions were advocated in the literature, the former by Mańczak (1958), the latter by Kuryłowicz (1947). In this paper, dedicated to Prof. Wojciech Smoczyński, this debate is discussed and illustrated by Baltic examples.

The paper deals with a problem of philosophical style in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889–1951) most significant works Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations and in a posthumous collection of miscellaneous remarks Culture and Value as well. The author performs a comparative analysis between two different writing strategies of Wittgenstein’s philosophy – the analytical and the literary/cultural one. Since the truth is made rather than found, the author states that the problem of truth is replaced by the problem of style in Wittgen­stein’s philosophy. This paper extensively discusses Buffon`s statement that “the style is a picture of hu­man being himself”, and the style of writing reveals the philosopher as a creator of literature.According to Wittgenstein, philosophy is not a theory or a doctrine, but rather an activity and clarifi­cation of thoughts, so the main principle of Wittgen­stein’s philosophy is “showing” rather than “saying”. With the help of this distinction, he tried to over­come the boundary between sayable and unsayable. The concept of “saying” in Wittgenstein’s works is related to systematic philosophy and the other one – that of “showing” – is related to edifying philosophy and poetic pragmatism because namely poetry goes beyond the limits of language not by saying, but by showing and, this way, discloses the novelty of one’s text as a piece of literature.Creating works in fine arts (sculpture and archi­tecture) Wittgenstein acknowledged the importance of the inseparable unity between the idea and its expression. This paper also highlights the reasons why Wittgenstein used a fragmentary, sketch writing style. The philosopher proposes intentionally to his readers the examples of thinking; still, instead of try­ing to tell them what things are indeed, he suggests looking at them from different points of view.

Straipsnyje iš postmodernizmo ir ekokritikos perspektyvų analizuojamas amerikiečių rašytojos Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) kūrinys „Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams“ ir Jolitos Skablauskaitės „Liūnsargių moteris“. Šie kvazi-siurealistiniai pasakojimai, iš pirmo žvilgsnio aprašantys individualias psichines būsenas, išties atveria socialinius determinantus, lemiančius žmogaus ir aplinkos santykį. Abu kūriniai reprezentuoja postmodernaus pasakojimo ypatumus: sutrikimą, fragmentaciją, nestabilų balansavimą ties beprotybės riba. Pagrindinės kūrinių veikėjos moterys yra nuolat persekiojamos išorinių jėgų (vyriškojo autoriteto) užvaldymo baimės ir šis nerimas tampa pagrindine asmenybės krizės priežastimi. Straipsnyje brėžiamos jungtys tarp postmodernizmo ir ekokritikos. Analizėje didžiausias dėmesys kreipiamas į Plath ir Skablauskaitės kūrinius vienijančią ypatybę: abiems kūrėjoms artimą santykį su aplinka, lytiškumu, sociumu, kuris išreiškiamas atskleidžiant ir kritikuojant įvairius gamtos ir kultūros sąveikos aspektus atspindinčius įvaizdžius. Plath tekstas gali būti perskaitytas kaip pareiškimas, jog metafizinė gamta ir racionali kultūra neegzistuoja kaip holistinis vienis; kultūra yra užvaldžiusi gamtą ir nutraukusi visus saitus su prigimtiniu natūralumu. Skablauskaitės kūrinyje išryškėja lytiškumo nulemta erdvės pajauta, kurią įkūnija pagrindinės herojės saviidentifikacija su natūralia aplinka/liūnu ir neigiama miesto erdvės konotacija. Tekstas suteikia galimybę analizuoti sąsajas tarp natūralumo ir primityvumo bei socialinių santykių, estetinių ir moralinių verčių. The paper takes the postmodern and eco-critical perspectives to analyse the book “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” by American author Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) and “Liūnsargių moteris” [The Quagmire Woman] by Jolita Skablauskaitė. These quasi-surreal narratives though seem to be focused on the representation of individual psychic states, foreground social determinants that affect the relationship between humans and the environment. Both stories exhibit features associated with a postmodern narrative: disorder, fragmentation, insecure bordering on insanity. The female protagonists exhibit fear of being controlled by outside powers (male authority), and this anxiety causes a major identity crisis. The paper draws the links between postmodernism and eco-criticism. The analysis focuses on the feature common to the works of Plath and Skablauskaitė: their close relation to the environment, gender and the social environment by exposing and criticizing tropes that reflect the multifarious aspects of interaction between nature and culture. Plath’s story may be read as a proclamation that a metaphysical nature and rationalistic culture do not exist as a holistic unity; culture has overwhelmed nature and disrupted links with the natural. Skablauskaitė’s story emphasises the gendered perception of space that can be gleaned from the protagonist’s self-identification with the natural/the quagmire and the negative connotations associated with the city. The story provides a locus for investigating the link between the natural/primitive and the social relations as well as aesthetic and moral matters.