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The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), widely recognized as one of the most important documents in foreign language teaching, defines the levels of communicative language proficiency. The common points of reference are primarily meant to assist foreign language teachers and test developers striving to adhere to a unified understanding of CEFR levels. Yet it is not uncommon among practitioners to claim a particular level of a task, text or sample of learner performance drawing merely on their individual experience and intuition, with only limited knowledge of the original descriptor scales. The main purpose of this paper is to describe general procedures for relating foreign language tests and learner performances to the CEFR as they are prescribed by the Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE). The five stages of the linking process are familiarisation, specification, standardisation training and benchmarking, standard setting and validation. While the full implementaion of the linking process is a complex undertaking mostly applied in the context of high stakes examinations, certain stages of the linking process could be implemented by individual language schools and programmes. Benchmarking is one of such stages. It involves identification of illustrative learner performances for different proficiency levels. This is a stage which also has its relevance in daily teaching practice and could be easily incorporated in routine assessment procedures thus increasing foreign language teachers' awareness of CEFR levels. Therefore the discussion of the formal linking procedures in this paper is followed by a demonstration of an exercise in benchmarking. It is meant to acquaint the Lithuanian readers with the complexity of the linking process and encourage a more principled approach to level allocations. The exercise in alignment with CEFR level decribed here involves L2 spoken Lithuanian produced by five foreign learners of young age. Sample performances were taken from a corpus of L2 Lithuanian compiled within the XXX project. Since the subjects are children of 11–12 years, another important challenge in the alignment with the CEFR is children's maturity and the necessary adaptation of CEFR descriptors for young learners. Qualitative analysis of five learner samples offers a number of insights into practicalities of linking procedures and discusses ways to ensure reliability and objectivity.

This paper qualitatively examines mixed speech styles within the context of two single-gendered white-collar Lithuania-based workplaces situated in Vilnius: an IT company and a company producing cosmetics (COSM). In Lithuanian contexts, mixed speech styles could be broadly defined as a flow of speech consisting of linguistic resources from languages other than Lithuanian (mainly English and Russian) incorporated into otherwise Lithuanian talk. The paper focuses on situated usage of mixed speech styles employed in talk at work. It aims to see how the linguistic enactment of mixed speech styles varies according to the working team and how such variation may influence the construction of participants’ complex identities. The research is based on naturally occurring recorded speech, and the method applied could be determined as ethnographically informed Interactional Sociolinguistics. The analysis shows that the two single-gendered communities of practice examined do not draw on the same non-native linguistic resources and that such dissimilar speaker choices and identity work can be predetermined by an intricate interplay of social and situational factors.

The present paper deals with the attrition of the first language. It presents a general overview of language attrition as a research field and discusses the main characteristics of the phenomenon by examining some typical lexical, grammatical, and phonological properties of attriters’ speech. Our attention is drawn here to a variety of factors, such as age, time spent in the L2 environment, frequency of first language use, language attitudes, and other aspects that have an impact on language attrition. The paper also reflects on and motivates the choice of the term ‘attrition’ in the Lithuanian academic use. The current empirical analysis focuses on an extreme case of first language attrition in the situation of international adoption of an early-teenager (~12 years old) Lithuanian girl adopted to Italy. The linguistic development of the girl was normal, and at the time of adoption she was regularly literate in Lithuanian L1. With the adoption, her language environment switched completely from Lithuanian to Italian. This case study is based on longitudinal observation and speech recordings mainly from the final stage of the observation period, i.e., 14 months after her departure from the country of origin. The paper examines Lithuanian utterances and other elements of the Lithuanian language in the girl’s communication. Her spontaneous speech is analysed mostly on the lexical and grammatical level, but some other language levels are also touched upon. The analysis shows a very advanced stage of first language attrition not only on the most evident – lexical – level, but also substantial changes on the grammatical level. The data shows that categories of tense, aspect, indefiniteness, case, and even gender, which differ in the two – Lithuanian and Italian – languages, have been impacted by the new dominant language. To conclude, even though the girl’s age and particularly positive attitudes towards the Lithuanian language were quite likely the most important factors for her maintaining some of the language one year later, the attrition of her L1 is still very advanced.

The paper analyzes the results of a sentence repetition task performed by Lithuanian L2 speakers of different language proficiency levels. This paper focuses on a set of targeted verb forms included in the task because they are less likely to occur in free production. The different forms the speakers produced are analyzed by considering their correspondence (or not) to the targeted form, by comparing the speakers among each other with respect to their learner variety and by comparing the task results to the repertoire of the same speaker in the free production data. In multiple cases of failed re-production, the analysis examines what the targeted forms were substituted with and tries to identify possible reasons for such substitution. This analysis confirms the general inability of the basic variety speakers to distinguish between morphologically different forms and the dominant trend showing that L2 learners are more meaning-focused than form-focused. The analysis also shows growing implicit knowledge, or at least gradual passive acquisition, of the less frequent forms as the speaker advances in the post-basic continuum.

The paper aims to reveal the process of face and power construction in the context of political TV debates in Lithuania and to analyse face threatening acts (FTAs) in terms of propositional content and orientation to the addressee’s face. This study adopts the qualitative content analysis approach to analyse 360 minutes of political debates broadcasted before the 2016 Lithuanian parliamentary elections. The current paper presents the concept of impoliteness, which is later applied in the empirical analysis to address two main objectives: (a) to analyse the process of face and power construction in political TV debates and (b) to study FTAs in terms of propositional content and orientation to the addressee’s face. The results of the study have revealed that politicians seek to get more power by producing FTAs towards their opponents; a zero-sum game metaphor can be used to describe this process. Also, the analysis of FTAs has demonstrated that politicians tend to apply both negative and positive impoliteness strategies. The analysis of FTAs in terms of propositional content has shown that politicians are mostly described as the ones who are lying, hiding the truth, and have performed wrong and ineffective actions in the past. This suggests that participants in Lithuanian political TV debates seek to damage their rival’s face in a way which does not harm their own face by applying indirect – positive and negative – impoliteness strategies and by negatively describing their opponents’ professionalism and general competencies.

By employing a functional-cognitive frame, this paper, in which neologisms derived from English are analysed, focuses on the semantics of new Hungarian terms of quality assurance (quality management in general). Although the importance of unambiguous terms in scientific communication is often emphasised (Temmerman 2002: 211), it has been observed that the presence of conceptual metonymies and metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Panther and Thornburg 2003, Kövecses 2015) also fosters understanding of technical languages. The author’s previous research in the field of the semantics of Hungarian neologisms (e.g. Sólyom 2014a, b, 2016) has also revealed that the presence of metonymies and metaphors has a significant impact upon the process of meaning construal. The present research assumes that various metonymic and metaphorical meanings occur in the semantics of novel Hungarian terms of quality assurance. To attest this, examples from a questionnaire filled by Hungarian quality engineers in 2018 will be analysed. Another question addressed in this paper is whether there is a mental reason for the fact that although there are colloquial Hungarian words and expressions for describing the processes of manufacturing, experts in the field do not use them, but rather employ neologisms with English roots. Indeed, this is how specialists distinguish technical terms from everyday expressions.

The primary goal of this paper is to examine the coverage of the 2008-2009 economic crisis in the Lithuanian online media as well as its relationship to the actual economic situation and perception of media consumers. The theoretical basis for this research is made up of the theories of agenda-setting and framing. The coverage of the media is assessed on the basis of the corpus of economic reporting in 2006–2014 in two Lithuanian media sources, the news agency BNS and DELFI news website, by analysing the volume and the tone of the reports. The coverage in the media is then compared to some statistical economic indicators. The main findings of the paper are the following: 1. The coverage of the crisis in the media reflected rather accurately the actual situation: the fluctuations of the volume of the reports largely followed the timeline of the main events of the crisis. The correlation between the reporting tone and industrial production index as a gauge of the economic situation was rather high, which supports the adequacy of the coverage. The relationship between the reporting and economic indicators was found to be stronger in the case of the BNS than in DELFI. 2. Negative reports were found to be dominating over positive ones. It is partially inevitable due to the context of the crisis, but the effect of the general media negativity bias cannot be ruled out either. 3. During the year of the worst economic situation, the number of the reports of both highly negative and highly positive tone increased, but the volume of the two extremes decreased with the improvement of the economic situation. This might suggest that the media was aiming to counterweight the flow of very negative news during the crisis. 4. On average, the tone of the BNS news agency coverage was more positive than that of DELFI. The factors behind this trend could be the linguistic features of the reporting style (usage of intensifying modal words as well as negatively or positively image-evoking lexis) and the intention to attract attention from the audience. 5. Certain asymmetry was noticed in the public reaction to the coverage of the crisis in the media as media consumers reacted more rapidly and for a longer time period to the deterioration in the reporting tone than to its improvement. 6. The correlation to media coverage was stronger in the case of the consumer sentiment indicator rather than in the case of the indicator for consumer behaviour (retail trade turnover index). It should be noted that the analysis was limited to only two media channels, so the inclusion of other media channels, especially television, could make such research more informative. Further research could include an additional corpus of reports with such keywords as “recession”, “recovery”, “growth”, “unemployment” and similar items. An analysis of the effects of linguistic factors alone on the reporting tone could also provide some interesting insights. Research on the coverage tone in relation to different subjects (economy, companies and political events) could be another valuable addition to the study.

The idea of this paper arose in a reading group of several colleagues at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University after a discussion of a review article published by the editors of Language Teaching. Titled ‘Replication studies in language learning and teaching’ (2008), the paper focuses on replication studies and argues that they should be promoted and valued no less than original research. The participants of the reading group agreed that replication studies, understood here primarily as replications of quantitative research, are indeed an important issue that could be of interest to the broader community of applied linguists in Lithuania. The present paper argues that attempts to replicate earlier studies, which are very scarce or non-existent in Lithuania, deserve more attention both from novice and mature researchers. Replications are particularly valuable in developmental studies where replicating a study over a period of time allows the researcher to obtain data for continued analysis. Furthermore, a replication of a published study that deals with data collected in one country offers an opportunity to verify its findings in a different context and this way consolidates our understanding of phenomena under study. Finally, replication is an invaluable learning method to a novice linguist, be it a senior undergraduate or postgraduate student. Thus the authors of this paper would like to promote the idea of replication research in our community as well as encourage everyone interested make use of the increasingly growing amount of open access data available on the internet.

The paper deals with the effects of prescriptivism on the Lithuanian language. The research includes one domain of language use – radio and television, and one aspect of language – lexicon, in the period between 1960 and 2010. The investigation is corpus-based and focuses on the use of words that are classified as “incorrect” by the Lithuanian norm-setters. The study is important both as a discussion of the impact of prescriptivism on language change in general, as well as of the indirect influence of media on language, since media can affect the symbolic evaluation of specific language forms. The paper consists of five chapters. The first chapter “Review of the research” discusses the theoretical assumptions and concepts needed for further analysis: it gives an overview of studies on the effects of prescriptivism conducted in Lithuania and elsewhere, presents the concepts of second-level indexicality and style, and outlines the key characteristics of media change in Lithuania that are relevant to the study. Studies on the success of prescriptivism do not give a definite answer as to whether prescriptivism works. Institutionalisation and a high degree of stigmatisation of the corrected language forms can be listed among the factors that increase its success; prescriptivism is likely to be less successful when the “forbidden” language forms are too convenient to be given up, or when prescriptivist rules are too complicated for lay language users and the rules contradict each other. In the case of media, the effect of prescriptivism is said to be weakened by media commercialisation. When applied to the analysis of non-standard words, first-order indexicality refers to situations when the non-standard forms are used as value-free instances of ordinary speech, in already established meanings; in these cases, the speakers are not aware that they are using “incorrect” forms. Second-order indexicality refers to cases when non-standard words are used for additional function, e.g., to express a speaker’s particular identity or to construct a certain (informal, friendly) speech style. The concept of style, referring to the social differences between individual speakers, is used to analyse the use of words in concrete situations. The paper gives an overview of three sociolinguistic concepts of style that are relevant in this study: style as a degree of formality (e.g., when the speaker accommodates to the formal context of the media and uses less non-standard words); as audience and referee design (e.g., use of non-standard words in programmes for young audiences); and as a speaker design (e.g., play with language by the programme host in order to construct a fun persona). In the study of non-standard lexis, it is important to account for certain features of Lithuanian media development, such as the Soviet period, which was characterised by the use of newspeak, and the commercialisation of the media in the contemporary period. Accordingly, the paper analyses the uses of incorrect words as a part of newspeak and their use for the entertainment-related purposes such as language plays in present times. The paper also addresses the transitory period of radio and TV development, which has features from both the previous and the later periods, as well as some unique characteristics of language use. The second chapter “Radio and TV speech in the prescriptive discourse” presents an analysis of the metalinguistic discourse on media speech produced by Lithuanian prescriptivists from the pre-war period up to now. The analysis shows how this discourse preserved the same dominant idea about media’s role in language standardisation. On the one hand, during this whole time, radio and television were approached as responsible for teaching listeners and viewers the “correct language”; on the other hand, simultaneously, the language of radio and television was perceived as failing to conform to the prescriptive norms set by the norm-setters. The huge societal shifts that happened during this time did not make a major influence on this discourse. It remained very stable during different periods of time. The social, cultural and political changes in society and the media were taken into account only by adjusting the argumentation – by presenting patriotic, moral, ideological or legal motives that were meant to justify the language prescriptions. The third chapter “Research methods and data” presents the Corpus of Radio and TV speech, the concept of non-standard words, and the sources of prescriptivist corrections used in the analysis. The corpus of radio and TV speech includes data from 1960 to 2011 and is constructed in a balanced way to represent the periods of Lithuanian radio and TV development (Soviet, transitory, contemporary), as well as programme genres (talk programmes, information programmes, journals/features/documentaries). The speakers are coded into six types: news reader/voice-over, talk show host, expert, celebrity, hero and vox populi. For the analysis, the non-standard words that are classified as “incorrect” in the normative tradition of the Lithuanian language were coded. These include old (mainly, Slavic) and new (mainly, English) loans, the so-called hybrid words (that have a borrowed part), semantic loans, translations, as well as some lexicalised uses of words and some lexicalised syntactic constructions. Two types of words are analysed – individual lexical words and functional words. The latter include various fillers and discourse markers, as well as pronoun constructions with tai (e.g. kažkas tai ‘some(body)’). Non-standard words were identified from older and present style guides, including the database of language corrections created by the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language. The fourth chapter “Change in the number of non-standard words: a quantitative analysis” investigates development of the use of non-standard words on radio and TV, as well as the frequency of usage of the non-standard lexical forms. According to the corpus data, the average frequency of non-standard words by one speaker is 17 per thousand words, which makes up about 2–3 “incorrect” words per minute. Non-standard discourse markers and fillers (9.8/1000 words) are used most frequently, whereas individual lexical words (5.6/1000 words) are much less frequent, and pronoun constructions with tai (1.6/1000 words) are rarer still. Closer analysis revealed that the only statistically significant change between the analysed periods (Soviet, transitory and contemporary) was a decrease of the frequency of non-standard lexical words in the contemporary period compared to the previous ones. The frequency of discourse markers/fillers and pronoun constructions with tai did not change. Regarding the speaker types, the uses of non-standard words decreased in those groups that are within easier reach of prescriptivism – news readers/voice-overs and talk show hosts. Also, to a lesser extent, in the group of experts. Those groups of speakers that are less likely to be subjected to language correction practices (ordinary people) did not seem to change their behaviour: the number of non-standard words in their speech did not decrease, on the contrary, a slight increase has been noticed. These findings confirm the effects of institutionalised prescriptivism. Regarding genres, non-standard words are least frequent in information programmes, which are mostly based on the reading of written texts. Lists of the most frequent non-standard words during the three periods overlap to a great extent, which means that despite prescriptivist practices, the most frequent non-standard words do not disappear from the air. The fifth chapter “Change in the functions of non-standard words: a qualitative analysis” investigates specific communicative situations of the usage of non-standard words and takes into account the media-related and societal contexts, as well as the stylistic and social functions of the corrected lexis. A common trait of the use of non-standard words during all periods, interpreted as the first level of indexicality, is the use of common, everyday vocabulary, most likely without being aware of the “incorrect” status of the chosen forms. Also, non-standard words are used as a part of professional language, in this case the speaker might be aware that he or she is using an ‘incorrect’ word, but chooses to use it nevertheless for convenience or because of its indexical value for professional identity. During all the periods, non-standard words are also used as indices of informal and authentic communication between close acquaintances; this function is performed by all types of the studied non-standard words, particularly old borrowings and frequent fillers. The study identified a few style- and social meaning-related uses of non-standard lexis that explain the choice of the corrected forms instead of the required equivalents. In the Soviet period, some non-standard words were used as a part of Soviet newspeak; old borrowings were used in references to the ideological enemies of Soviet rule, mainly the ones from pre-war Lithuania. In certain cases, these words were employed due to their stylistic value in an intimate and authentic discourse. The late Soviet period saw the first use of non-standard words as markers of informal communication. The use of non-standard words in the transitory period shows some of the functions from the Soviet period, e.g., they are used as an element of newspeak, albeit without the Soviet ideological value, or as expressions of informality. A particular feature of this period is the use of non-standard words as an index of live and authentic speech, which was not allowed during Soviet times, as a means of authentic communication, and the criticism and violation of Soviet taboos. The contemporary period is marked by a huge variety of functions of non-standard words. It brings in a number of new style-related functions of non-standard words: construction of youth-oriented identity and youth-oriented referee design, reference to past times (e.g., by using non-standard words reflecting the Soviet reality), or quoting. Perhaps the most distinctive features of this period are the use of non-standard words in the speech of professional journalists, as well as their use for the purposes of humour and entertainment (for the construction of certain personas), e.g., in language plays and stylisations. These uses can be explained by commercial media requirements, increasing trends of the informalisation of public speech and conversationalisation. The study concluded that the effect of prescriptivism on the use of non-standard words in radio and TV in Lithuania is limited. Firstly, the frequency of non-standard words decreased mainly in those groups of speakers that are subject to the formal, institutionalised power of language gatekeepers (media professionals). Secondly, the data shows a decrease only of those non-standard words that are easier to control by the speakers themselves – lexical words. The frequency of various function words that are more difficult to be aware of when speaking did not decrease. Thirdly, the largest decrease in non-standard lexical forms occurred in those speech situations where a prepared written text is used; this means that prescriptivist requirements have a greater effect when the speakers and the language are controlled, and less effect in spontaneous communication situations. The above-mentioned difference between professional and non-professional speakers demonstrates that speakers are able to control the lexical forms they choose. Analysis of the most frequently used non-standard words during different periods also demonstrates the limits of prescriptivism. The lists of the most frequently used non-standard words during different periods overlap to a great extent, which means that despite prescriptivist efforts, they were not eliminated from being used on air. Finally, the limited success of prescriptivism is demonstrated by the discussed social values of non-standard words, when they are used for various social and stylistic functions not possessed by a ‘correct’ equivalent. The qualitative analysis revealed the particular strength of old borrowings, which are used to create a sincere, friendly speech style, as well as a ludic speaker identity. On the one hand, it can be interpreted as a sign of the ineffectiveness of prescriptivism – if the words are needed, it is likely that they will be further used despite their ‘illegal’ status. On the other hand, when the speakers purposefully (e.g., on account of a particular association, stylistic value) choose a particular language form and are at the same time aware about its “incorrectness”, it is an effect of prescriptivism, only with the opposite outcome. The study is based on the analysis of spoken language on radio and TV, therefore it cannot be used to draw conclusions about the Lithuanian language in general. It is likely that the effect of prescriptivism on written language (because of its more formal style and particularly because of language editing practices) would be stronger. Nevertheless, broadcast media speech constitutes a considerable and important part of language use, thus we can conclude that the impact of prescriptivism on the Lithuanian language does not have far-reaching effects.

This paper introduces the first version of the Lithuanian database of free association norms. This is an attempt to provide an open-access resource, which would be helpful for psycholinguists, linguists, computational linguists, and students. This version of the database includes 277 cue word forms. The responses were collected from 304 participants. In total 15,612 association pairs were recorded. The paper presents the procedure of collecting free associations and additional data available for researchers. It also provides a list of all cue words with their five most frequent associates and some summary statistics.

The paper aims to discuss the expression and development of politeness speech acts, i.e. greeting, saying goodbye, thanking, usage of the word please, apology, congratulation and wishes, in the speech of a Lithuanian boy, aged 1;6–2;7, and a girl, aged 1;8–2;8. The source of data contains two corpora of transcribed conversations of the children mostly interacting with their mothers (about 20 and 27 hours of recordings are transcribed). The corpora are developed by scholars of Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. One of the foci of analysis is to discuss the expression and development of the above-mentioned politeness speech acts and common pragmatic errors regarding the usage of politeness formulas in the children’s speech. Another focus is the investigation of the socialization strategies applied by the parents. Based on the current research by different scholars, the article raises the hypothesis that Lithuanian children in the second or third year of life acquire the majority of politeness speech acts as discussed in this paper. The analysis revealed that at the beginning of the observation children lacked communicative competence to use politeness speech acts in a pragmatically appropriate way. They confused situations when to use politeness formulas of thanking, apology and the word please and lacked the knowledge of how to use politeness adjacency pairs. The study also shows that the repetition of parents’ politeness formulas was common. Furthermore, the appropriate use of spontaneous and pragmatic greeting and saying goodbye was observed first, and only later the usage of thanking and the word please appeared. However, only few examples of other politeness speech acts (i.e. apology, congratulation and wishes) were observed in the corpus. Therefore, further research is necessary. The results demonstrate that at the beginning of the third year the children used most of the politeness speech acts appropriately. An early acquisition was affected by children’s familiarisation with politeness routines taught by their parents. The parents directed and prompted their children to repeat politeness formulas, elicited them by questions or performatives and sometimes taught children to be polite by producing metalinguistic comments. Current research seems to indicate that other Lithuanian children could demonstrate similar developmental patterns of politeness speech acts and make similar pragmatic errors as well as being similarly socialized to use politeness formulas.

From the corpus data, we observe that in the real language usage, the particular verb does not appear in all theoretically possible finite and infinite verb forms in the morphologically rich Lithuanian but is used in those forms which are relevant for the verb patterning. On the one hand, by teaching vocabulary, is it important to represent lexis in these relevant forms – frequently used forms, and, on the other hand, in grammar teaching, there is a need to provide learners with appropriate vocabulary, e.g., by teaching infinite forms, to use verbs, in the usage of which, these forms are relevant and frequent. In this paper, we provide language teaching practitioners with the data about the frequently used Lithuanian verbs and show which of them and how often appear in infinite forms (participles in passive and active voice, adverbial participles, half participles). As a research data we use 200 verbs from the Lexical Database of Lithuanian Language Usage which was developed on the basis of the written subcorpus of the Pedagogic corpus of Lithuanian. The investigated verbs belong to the frequent vocabulary: in the corpus of approx. 700,000 tokens, these verbs are used 100 times (and above). First, we analysed, which verbs appear in infinite forms, second, we checked whether frequent and typical infinite forms are included into corpus pattern(s) of these particular verbs, and if there is a link between the infinite form and a particular meaning of the verb. All verbs (except of three verbs with no infinite forms) were included into one of three groups: 1) 11 verbs which occur in the infinite forms frequently (more than 50% of all forms – finite and infinite) and, accordingly, typical; 2) 117 verbs with the infinite forms making up from 10 to 50%; 3) 69 verbs, with the infinite forms making up less than 10% of all verb forms. Interestingly, the verbs of the first group, usually have only one infinite form, e.g., participle in passive voice which makes up more than 50% of all forms of verb. These cases are also frequently observed in the second verb group. Thus, if the verb tends to be used in infinite forms, it is important to know which infinite form is relevant to that particular verb. In the Lexical Database of Lithuanian Language Usage, lexical and grammatical patterning of the word is represented in the form of corpus patterns. In this study, we showed the interrelation between the frequently used infinite forms of the verb and its corpus patterns (also, corpus patterns related to particular meaning of the polysemous verb). We can expect various applications of the provided data in the Lithuanian as a foreign language teaching: the provided data about the verbs typical and frequent in infinite forms and the corpus patterns including these infinite forms can be used for building vocabulary training as well as for developing grammar exercises.

The paper delves into the situated usage of mixed speech produced by adult Lithuanians at work, the environment hardly ever sociolinguistically researched in Lithuania. By mixed speech, Lithuanian speech interspersed with occasional insertional elements from other languages is meant. The study aims to see how more diverse linguistic resources that are now available in Lithuania are used to construct and negotiate social relations and social identities in the talk at work. The case study, which is a part of an ongoing larger scale project on Lithuanian workplace discourse, draws on digital audio recordings of naturally occurring spontaneous conversations between employees collected by a volunteer in a media-related company in Vilnius. The recordings containing elements of languages other than Lithuanian (English and Russian) have been transcribed and analysed using Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS), an in-depth qualitative approach that combines the application of the interpretive methods of discourse analysis with insights into social and cultural issues. The paper argues that mixed speech in Lithuanian workplace discourse is creatively used as group or individual stylistic choice to construct certain social images and to perform various functions: for instance, mixed speech containing Russian insertions, slang and swear words serves as an index of belonging to the group (or a community of practice), whereas English is a necessary tool for doing well in a contemporary work environment and presenting oneself as an expert in one’s professional field; English insertions tend to be employed when things need to be quickly and efficiently done while Russian is still used more extensively for off-task talk, such as small talk, gossiping, humour and jokes, which constitute an integral part of the talk at work. It can be hypothesised, however, that the range of functions performed by English insertions is gradually expanding as the command of Russian among co-workers is decreasing. The study depicts mixed speech as a means of negotiating social identities of a friendly and supportive colleague, a skilled and experienced professional, a creative, playful and adaptive communicator, and an open-minded, educated and sophisticated person.

The present study investigates how beginner adult students of Lithuanian as a foreign language assign natural gender to nouns. The grammatical category of gender is a complex phenomenon which belongs to the domains of syntax, morphology and semantics. As far as this paper is concerned, the assignment of grammatical gender is recognised as an academically challenging task to foreign language learners; however, the issue is still under-researched in the studies of Lithuanian as a foreign language. The aim of this study is to examine whether the beginner adult learners of Lithuanian as a foreign language rely on semantic or morphological clues when assigning natural gender, to identify the difficulties they encounter and the reasons for the difficulties. The paper analyses how learners assign natural gender to the nouns when their morphological and semantic clues conform, how they deal with gender conflict and how they assign indefinite gender to nouns. 15 Vilnius University students, who attended courses on Lithuanian as a foreign language, were asked to participate in an experimental task, which consisted of assigning a masculine or feminine pronoun to 50 different nouns. The participants were provided with both morphological form of a noun and its visual representation, i.e. the students were given pictures reflecting a biological sex of the referents. The empirical analysis of the material was based on the method of error analysis. The results of the study have revealed that the beginner learners of Lithuanian as a foreign language tended to rely more on semantic than morphological clues when assigning natural gender. As expected, most errors were made when the learners had to deal with gender conflict. It was also established that the participants of the experimental task performed worse on marked plural forms of nouns than on unmarked singular forms. Finally, it turned out that the learners made more errors when they had to assign gender to unknown nouns, which showed that they had not been prepared to use semantic or morphological clues for the purpose of identifying the gender of unknown words. Since a relatively small number of learners were involved in the study, its insights should be confirmed by further research. The study might be relevant to researchers of foreign language acquisition and foreign language teachers.

Humour is part of human communication and can serve as an effective means for making contact, finding a way out of an embarrassing situation, or mitigating different political and social tensions. However, not all humans are born capable of generating and processing humour and it remains an open question whether it is possible to learn and develop this ability. Therefore, a sense of humour, but not an *ability of humour, would be a frequent collocation in many languages. Cognitive linguists claim that collocations are not accidental as combinability patterns point to certain conceptualisation processes in the expression of meaning. The cognitive linguistic viewpoint that humour is based on a mismatch, or incongruity, between ideas, otherwise referred to as frame shifting, is adopted as a prerequisite for producing humour in this paper. The focus of this paper is the expression of verbal humour dealing with the introduction of the euro in Lithuania in 2015. Verbal humour is created by employing different linguistic resources: sounds, spelling, word building models, homonymy and polysemy, word combinations and other syntactic structures and larger chunks of texts or discourse. The investigation is based on the main theories of humour: the Semantic Script Theory and the Superiority Theory developed by Attardo (1994) and Raskin (1985). The empirical material consists of 89 cases of verbal humour found in posts and comments in personal profiles and pages on Facebook and in reader comments following different articles in popular news portals written from September 2014 to February 2015. The paper attempts to describe linguistic means contributing to the construction of humour as well as to identify the shifts between frames involved in generating the humorous effect. The results of the investigation suggest that most humorous comments bear content-related political implications, shifting between the frames of the loss of national currency perceived either as the loss of stability or as the loss of national identity and the frame of positive expectations due to the greater integration into the EU. The techniques used to construct humour include wordplay based on sound combinations, similar spelling, non-standard spelling, and code-switching involving English and Russian. An especially productive technique was the construction of existing or non-existing words by code-mixing and the use of metaphor and metonymy. Larger chunks of text also employ intertextuality, parody, switching between registers and different types of echoing.

The paper overviews the main trends of research into the semantics of spatial prepositions, as demonstrated by a plethora of papers on linguistic data from a variety of languages. The more traditional approach focuses on the locative meaning with respect to other words—both syntagmatically and in paradigms, thus ruling out pragmatics—and considers multiple senses of the same preposition to be arbitrary. In contrast, the modern framework employs the principles of cognitive linguistics for semantic analysis, highlighting the conceptual structuring of entities or relations in extralinguistic reality. On the basis of geometric, functional, and other relations between the figure and the ground, it attempts to explicate not only prepositional synonymy, but also extensive polysemy as a form of categorisation. As a consequence, the distinct meanings of a preposition are considered to be related, deriving either from the prototypical sense or any other sense which is related to it, and arranged in a network. The modern line of investigation may provide more possibilities for researchers interested in one language and/or in cross-linguistic studies, thus contributing to the development of lexicography, translation, and other fields of applied linguistics.

The article is based on a universal social network theory. It also offers a socio-cultural network of two subdialect areas: Western Aukštaitians of Kaunas and Eastern Aukštaitians of Panevėžys. The paper attempts to investigate migration directions of residents of the inhabited areas included into the Atlas of Lithuanian Language (ALL points). They are used to identify hypothetical zones of ALL points demonstrating a high degree of subdialect vitality. The research material consists of statistical data of 176 ALL points (121 of Western Aukštaitians of Kaunas and 86 of Eastern Aukštaitians of Panevėžys) collected in 2011–2015. The data is summarized in a table. The paper also includes a socio-cultural network completed with the help of the software Paint referring to 6 criteria: movement directions (to schools, hospitals, libraries, churches, post offices and supermarkets) of the communities’ members residing in the ALL points and covering dialectal areas of Western Aukštaitians of Kaunas and Eastern Aukštaitians of Panevėžys. The paper evaluates the viability, social structure, communicative networks of situations and possible directions of dialectal changes of ALL points. The results show that both subdialects are linguistically similar in strength; both demonstrate high vitality. Dialectal features seem to be best maintained in and around Ariogala, Jurbarkas, Šakiai, Kazlų Rūda, Vilkaviškis, Kalvarija and Biržai, Pasvalys, Radviliškis, Ramygala. Subdialect changes have been mainly determined by a high degree of mobility within the dialectal areas rather than the impact of other dialects. Internal migration is stimulated by attractive supermarkets and medical institutions in the nearest ALL points, while migration to other areas of subdialects is motivated by attractive supermarkets (in case of Western Aukštaitians of Kaunas) or a lack of educational institutions in the original places of residence (in case of Eastern Aukštaitians of Panevėžys). A possible direction of changing dialectal features is the south in case of Western Aukštaitians of Kaunas and the west in case of Eastern Aukštaitians of Panevėžys. However, the opposite direction is not excluded: dialectal features of Western Aukštaitians of Kaunas are actively penetrating the dialectal area of Southern Aukštaitians and dialectal features of Eastern Aukštaitians of Panevėžys tend to spread in the dialectal area of Western Aukštaitians of Šiauliai. Presumably, the above indicators show that despite similarities and differences between both subdialects and the standard language, the subdialects have similar conditions to survive and become stronger.

The syntactic features of spoken Lithuanian are still under-researched due to insufficient data bases, limited technologies, and research methodologies. During the last years, the "Corpus of Spoken Lithuanian" (developed at Vytautas Magnus University; 225,000 words; 80 hours of digitalized audio recordings) has been syntactically annotated, and this has enabled complex automatized syntactic analysis. In the present paper, one of the first such studies is presented and its results are discussed. The corpus linguistics methodology has been employed. The paper deals with the frequency and basic types of attributive clauses in spoken Lithuanian language. The results of the study have highlighted that attributive clauses tend to be more frequent (up to 15% of all subordinate clauses) in public speech, and they are significantly less frequent (up to 7% of all subordinate clauses) in private spontaneous speech. The position of a subordinate clause after the head noun is unmarked and the most frequent in public speech and spontaneous private speech. Consequently, 65% and 88% of all attributive adjectives followed the head noun in private spontaneous speech and in public speech. Since in Lithuanian the word order is not so strict, in private spontaneous speech constructions with a subordinate clause before the head noun are used. The analysis of subordinating conjunctions and relative pronouns has revealed that in public speech the link between a subordinate clause and an independent clause tends to be expressed by the relative pronoun "kuris", "kuri" (‘which’). Namely, in public speech, this pronoun is employed in 85% of all attributive clauses. The number of relative pronouns in private spoken speech reaches only 30%, whereas the subordinating conjunction "kur" (‘where’) has been used in the majority of attributive clauses (51%). The findings of the study reveal the main tendencies in the distribution and frequency of attributive clauses and suggest that the usage of attributive clauses depends, to a large extent, on the register of spoken language.

This paper describes a cross-sectional method, which is employed when conducting research on acquisition of Lithuanian as a second language. This is one of the most optimal methods to study the process of language acquisition in adults, since it does not demand a long-term commitment on the part of the studied subjects. On the basis of the method, a specific research protocol has been designed in the framework of various second language acquisition research projects conducted in Europe. One of its advantages is that language data can be collected in a fairly small group (10-30 people) of learners of different acquisition levels. The data collected in this way is later analysed and compared between learners in order to determine the acquisitional sequence and other aspects of interest. The main corpus for this study is constituted by language data collected during a semi- structured (socio)linguistic interview, which is a free talk with a participant, who is encouraged to talk. The talk includes some specific questions. During the interview, not only the language data but also some important information about other relevant sociolinguistic factors is collected, such as age, period of stay in the country, language attitudes and motivation. To be able to better compare the participants and to study specific linguistic aspects that might fail to appear in spontaneous speech, all the participants are given the same additional tasks. The tasks described in this paper are of different types: film retelling, storytelling according to a sequence of pictures, describing two similar pictures and indicating differences between them, giving a recipe and repeating sentences. Different competences are required in these tasks but most attention is given to language production. The paper also offers some practical advice and observations based on the study. The specific study where the method was applied for Lithuanian aims at researching the development of acquisition of Lithuanian with the focus on the development of the verb system. The data collected in this manner could be used to study other aspects of language acquisition as well.

The paper deals with the Turkish deictic locative adverbs bura- (‘here’) ora- (‘there’) and şura- (‘here’, ‘there’). Some researchers (Lyons 1977, Levinson 1983, Anderson and Keenan 1985) claim that şura- occupies an intermediate position between bura- and ora-. Some others (Küntay and Özyürek 2002, 2006) note that şura- is neutral with regard to distance specifications. This investigation has identified a rather problematic usage of the deictic locative adverb şura-. Taking into account that contemporary Turkish language has gradually developed from a three-member deictic system into a two-member system, the paper attempts to more thoroughly investigate the usage of the locative adverb şura- and describe the prevailing deictic system in the Turkish language.

When two languages collide in the context of emigration, the heritage language is in danger of extinction because the two languages are different in size, power, vitality and prestige. The question then arises why some ethnic communities maintain their language, despite the fact that their situation is disadvantageous. The main aim of this paper is to explore specific factors that help maintain the Lithuanian language in the emigrant family. This paper analyses the data collected during the research project The Language of Emigrants. Only a subset of the data that is related to the United States was selected for research. This paper analyses linguistic attitudes of two emigration waves (those who moved after World War II and those who went there after the Restoration of Lithuania’s Independence) and three generations of emigrants. This investigation is based on a quantitative survey (n = 438) and qualitative in-depth semi-standardized interviews (n = 15) from the US (most of them were recorded in May 2012 in Los Angeles, CA). The data from the quantitative survey and in-depth semi-standardized interviews shows that a successful maintaining of the Lithuanian language depends on many factors: historical circumstances, reasons for emigrating, attitude towards Lithuania, perception of identity and roots, knowledge about the history of Lithuania, the history of one’s family, and about Lithuanian traditions. If the attitude towards Lithuania is positive, if it is important for the person to be Lithuanian, if the person is knowledgeable about the history of his/her family and about Lithuanian traditions, the prospects for maintaining the heritage language are favourable. The main reasons to maintain the Lithuanian language are ideological. The data from this research shows that all waves of emigrants find it important that Lithuanian language proficiency helps preserve the Lithuanian language and culture. It is no less important to note that participants have expressed a wish to protect the Lithuanian language; they want to keep it “clear”, “true” and “pure”. Another reason to maintain the Lithuanian language is the wish to have two worlds, two familiar countries and two cultures. Naturally, there are also several practical reasons: it is useful to know several languages, to communicate with Lithuanians in Lithuanian. The Lithuanian community in the US and maintaining ties with it are also very important for language maintenance.

The paper examines the ideology of the best language in the Lithuanian speech community. The research is based on synthesis of various metalinguistic data collected during previous research by the author. The regularity of the findings and stereotypical attitudes found in the data suggest that the idea of ​​the best Lithuanian in the Lithuanian speech community is closely linked to the largest city of Lithuania and the one of the highest social status – the capital Vilnius. Through the association with the city of Vilnius, the language of the „metropolis” and the „capital” acquires prestigious social meanings and the highest position in the hierarchy of Lithuanian language varieties. Metalinguistic localization in the metropolis gives following attributes to the best Lithuanian: non-dialectal, grammatical, correct, spoken by educated persons. Additional social values are developed through the association with the dwellers of the capital city and the urban center of the country itself: “modern”, “youthful”, “international”, “cosmopolitan”, “advanced”, as well as “self-confident”, “successful”, “wealthy”, “educated” and “cultivated”. All these attributions can be linked to the category dynamism, a valuable social value for, especially, young members of the community. Compared to the studies conducted elsewhere, it can be assumed that both linking of the ‘best speech’ with the speech of the metropolis or the capital city and the positive social associations of the capital city, is universal. All the research data collected using different methods during different investigations point to that there is basically no hierarchical relationship between the Vilnius speech and the standard Lithuanian in the best language perceptions of the Lithuanians. These two varieties are being integrated into one concept of the best speech spoken by best speaker, the one of the highest status, the most dynamic and competent as well possessing the best personality traits. Neither the stereotypical features associated with Vilnius speech (such as language mixing), nor the structural features of it (such as the so-called vowel lengthening, heavily criticized by the Lithuanian standard speech norm-setters), do not affect the concept of the best language by the community. Vilnius residents themselves and the general speech community evaluate linguistic features and prestige of the Vilnius speech differently from normative textbooks. The research presented in the paper makes it possible to predict that the link between capital Vilnius and the best speech of the community is the condition that will allow the speech of Vilnius to be taken over by language users and spread.

The use of semantic calques in academic legal written language is the focus of the present article. Semantic calques are words in new irregular meanings. The following two groups of semantic calques in academic legal written language are distinguished: old calques, which are produced in the Lithuanian language due to the impact of the Russian language, and new calques, which have been produced in the Lithuanian language due the impact of the English language. The most frequently used calques of the first group are the verbs (pa)talpinti, atstatyti, sutikti, naudoti and their derivatives, the adjectives pilnas, -a, vieningas, -a and their derivatives, the noun saugiklis. The most frequently used calques of the second group are the adjectives pilotinis, harmoningas, -a, the verb harmonizuoti and the noun harmonizavimas. The present paper aims to identify the key reasons why some semantic calques spread in the academic language of the law. According to the contact between the user of the calque and the foreign language of its origin, the article distinguishes two types of reasons: primary and secondary. Primary reasons (concerned with the direct contact between the user of the calque and the language of origin) can be divided into three general reasons: (1) life among bilingual population; (2) the author of the text is a non-native speaker of Lithuanian; (3) the author relies on secondary written sources (research papers, documents, legal acts) in foreign languages, especially on its non-professional translation. Secondary reasons are concerned with an indirect contact between the user of the calque and the language of origin. In many cases the user of the calque does not know the foreign language from which the calque has been adopted. Semantic calques are copied from administrative language (legal acts, codes), public spoken language and are the result of imitation. Due to secondary reasons the calque appearing in a narrow peripheral field of standard language is further transferred into general usage. The analysis of the texts has demonstrated that in most cases semantic calques spread in academic legal written language due to extralinguistic factors. For example, Soviet occupation is one of them, when Russian in fact had the status of a state language. Now we are in a different situation, when the EU membership requires that all legal acts be translated into national languages of all member states.

The present paper reports the instrumental analysis of the unstressed variants of /iː/, /uː/, /eː/, /oː/, /æː/ and /ɑː/. The study was carried out by employing the sound analysis software PRAAT, which was used to measure the length and tenseness of the specified variants. 10 residents of Vilnius city and 10 hosts of TV/radio programmes covering serious public topics were selected as the informants of the study. The main aims of this research were as follows: (1) to determine whether vowel length and tenseness differentiate the pronunciation of Vilnius city residents from that of the hosts of TV/radio programmes covering serious public topics, and (2) to reveal whether the hosts of TV/radio programmes use the length or tenseness of the unstressed variants of /iː/, /uː/, /eː/, /oː/, /æː/, /ɑː/ as a resource for creating a formal and serious speaking style. The current study examines, among other things, if the TV/radio hosts pronounce the unstressed variants of /iː/, /uː/, /eː/, /oː/, /æː/, /ɑː/ systematically more tensely, or perhaps on the contrary – they create the impression of a serious style only with isolated sounds of increased tenseness. The analysis has revealed that the hosts of TV/radio programmes covering serious topics pronounce the unstressed variants of /iː/, /uː/, /eː/, /oː/, /æː/ and /ɑː/ in the same length as Vilnius city residents speaking in a semi-formal style. Hence, vowel length in the said programmes is not a significant linguistic resource when creating a serious and formal speaking style and constructing the linguistic identity of a TV/radio host addressing serious public topics. However, TV/radio hosts covering serious public topics pronounce the unstressed variants of /iː/, /uː/, /eː/, /oː/, /æː/ and /ɑː/ with more tenseness than Vilnius city residents, which suggests that the style of the hosts is distinct from the semi-formal speaking style of Vilnius city residents and serves as a well-defined marker of a certain language standard. These findings are in line with some previous studies indicating that vowel tenseness statistically significantly distinguishes programmes covering serious public topics from entertainment-based programmes covering personal topics. Therefore, it can be argued that vowel tenseness differentiates speakers (TV/radio hosts vs. Vilnius city residents), types of programmes (programmes covering serious public topics vs. entertainment-based programmes covering personal topics), styles (formal vs. semi-formal), and language varieties (actual standard language vs. Vilnius speech). Thus, in the speech of hosts of TV/radio programmes covering serious public topics, tenseness acquires the indexical meaning of “I am speaking seriously”. The use of isolated vowels of increased tenseness is thus sufficient to create the impression of a serious speaking style and to form the linguistic identity of a TV/radio host covering serious topics.

In this paper I examine a particular type of morphological negation in French, namely non- prefixation on nominal bases (e.g. non-violence ‘nonviolence’). Drawing on a wide range of authentic examples from the Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé (TLFi), the French literary database Frantext and the internet, I show that although the basic meaning of non- prefixation is negation, the nouns prefixed by non- (abbreviated as [non-N]N) may carry an additional nuance, which can be pejorative or euphemistic; hence the hypothesis defended in this paper that the prefix non- can also serve pragmatic purposes. After having briefly described the morphological and semantic variety of nominal lexemes which can be the input of non- prefixation, I show that [non-N]N can have three different readings, namely what I call the “complementary” interpretation (e.g. les Italiens et les non-Italiens aiment la cuisine italienne ‘Italians and non-Italians like Italian cuisine’), the “ontological” interpretation (e.g. Toute sa vie durant, Gandhi est demeuré convaincu du bien-fondé de la non-violence ‘For all his life, Gandhi was convinced of the legitimacy of nonviolence’), and the “contrary interpretation” (e.g. Les fleurs, je m’en fiche. Serais-je une non-femme? ‘Flowers, I don’t care! Could I be a nonwoman?). In the second section, I describe the pejorative and euphemistic uses of [non-N]N. The pejorative useshave been noticed by several authors (a.o. Gaatone 1971, 1987, Di Sciullo and Tremblay 1993, 1996 for French, Zimmer 1964, Algeo 1971, Bauer 1983, Horn 1989 for English); I show that these uses arise when the [non-N]N have a contrary interpretation and that they are quite frequent. I also emphasize the importance of the discourse context compared to the semantics of the base noun. Then I address the euphemistic uses of [non-N]N, which are linked to the ontological interpretation, and which are more constrained and thus less frequent; I note that these uses function almost as a politeness device. The fourth section provides an attempt to draw a parallel between certain uses of [non-N]N and the polemic and metalinguistic uses of sentential negation, as they have been described by Ducrot (1980, 1984) and Horn (1985, 1989).

Text genres fall within the scope of interest of text linguistics. However, genre studies are not limited to this branch of linguistics, because the methods appropriated for this kind of studies vary to a large extent. An in-depth linguistic study of texts and their language inevitably goes beyond the limits of a few branches of linguistics: it combines the theory of semantics, pragmatics and text linguistics, including their methods. Moreover, corpus linguistics seems to be of specific importance in this kind of studies, including both the diachronic and synchronic aspects of study.Some researchers treat text genre linguistics as a separate branch of linguistics (see Heinemann 2000, Gansel 2011). The present paper suggests that the understanding of genre should not be limited to a certain set of textual conventions; it could be treated as a meaningful communicative action. In this context, genre recognition by informants seems to be of paramount importance. This approach to the genre, including the invocation of genre recognition, is fundamental in arguing that any texts, even short ones, could be analyzed as independent and produced under certain genre rules identified in the texts. The author of this paper adheres to the view that text units meaningful in communication and functioning without reference to other texts should be regarded as independent texts. Texts meaningful in communication refer to those conveying information, emotions, attitudes, etc., i. e. the addressers of such texts communicate with their addressees, and the latter perceive and recognise such texts as an expression of certain communicative situations. This paper discusses headlines in the news portals as one of the objects of independent text studies to substantiate the theoretical foundation introduced in the paper. It also presents the results of a pilot survey carried out to identify how internet users perceive headlines in the news portals. The results of the survey suggest that headlines in the news portals could be perceived as texts with a communicative purpose and the means to achieve it. Therefore headlines could be treated as characterized by certain attributes that help identify them as specific texts.

One of today’s most painful problems of the society of Lithuania is massive emigration, which is often heated debated in different circles of the society. One of the aspects of the problem is concerned with the Lithuanian language: whether or not the language should be maintained. Lithuanian emigrants often complain that their children are not willing to talk with their parents in their native/heritage language. On the other hand, there are many examples when after spending long years in emigration, people are still fluent in their native tongue and/or maintain strong national identity. Thus the paper aims at exploring strategies of how Lithuanian emigrant families maintain the Lithuanian language. The paper analyses the US subset of the data collected during the research project “The Language of Emigrants”. The subset consists of three generations of Lithuanian emigrants. The investigation is based on a quantitative survey (n = 438) and qualitative in-depth semi-standardized interviews (n=15) from the USA (most of them recorded in May 2012 in Los Angeles, CA). The results of the research suggest that successful maintenance of the Lithuanian language has been due to a conscious decision by the members of the family to keep the language as a language of communication in the family and to pass it over to the younger generation. Emotional ties with the native/heritage language are also very important. The investigation has identified the prevalence of the authoritarian management model of language maintenance in those families. No less important is the social environment outside the children’s home domain. Formal education and active involvement in the Lithuanian community are considered significant factors contributing to learning/maintaining the Lithuanian language. Regular trips to Lithuania also help strengthen the sense of ethnic identity.

The new borrowing barbekiu has not been included into dictionaries of the Lithuanian language so far, except for the Dictionary of Internationalisms (2001, 2008) and its internet version Interleksis. Due to the frequent use of the word, barbekiu is going to be included into the Dictionary of Standard Lithuanian. The present paper analyses the semantic structure of the borrowing, its use and normative recommendations, investigates dictionary entries of barbecue and its synonym grill as given in a number of English, Latvian, Russian, and Polish dictionaries. The use of the borrowing barbekiu in the Lithuanian language shows a slightly different semantic structure of the word than that offered in the dictionaries of the donor (English) language. On the whole, the findings of this research show that the semantic structure of the borrowing barbecue in the recipient languages differs from its semantic structure in the English language. Finally, the paper offers several tentative dictionary entries for the word barbekiu and its Lithuanian equivalents, which could be included into the Dictionary of Standard Lithuanian. In addition to the two meanings of the word that have already been discussed by language planners (i.e. barbecue as a ‘baking device’ and as a ‘certain steak’), the proposed dictionary entries would contain additional, more frequent meanings: ‘a way of preparing a certain kind of food’ and ‘a party in which food is prepared in this way’.

The paper deals with the representative systems of the Lithuanian language from the perspective of ordinary members of language community. The empirical data includes the names and nominations of the language variants given by ordinary members of language community. The data for the research was collected during the preliminary stage of the implementation of the research project Lithuanian Language: ideals, ideologies and identity shifts focusing on the analysis of prestigious aspects of the varieties of the Lithuanian language, language ideals, language ideologies, etc. The paper is an attempt at the typologization of discourse variants identified by ordinary members of language community by estimating the (lack of) correspondence of the variants with geolinguistic and sociolinguistic language variants offered by scholars within certain scientific paradigms. Geolinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives identify discursive variants according to objective differences and degree of their distinction. The investigation has manifested that the taxonomy of discursive variants suggested by ordinary members of language community helps locate oneself in the holistic space of the national language. The arguments raised in support of the above taxonomy include language facts as well as intuition, or the claim of I think that this is so type. Thus the isoglosses of perception of ordinary members of language community divide the national language continuum into a large number of segments. The respondents tend to give the status of 'variety' to the large, objectively independent representational systems, cf., Highland dialect, Lowland dialect, etc.; and to the representational systems that do not have the value of 'variety' from the perspective of a researcher, cf., regular vs irregular speech, sophisticated speech, etc. When speaking about the horizontal divisibility of language continuum offered by the ordinary members of language community and researchers, the most outstanding difference was that the ordinary members of language community had supplemented the binary dialect classification by two members. The taxonomy of the ordinary members of language community includes the Dzūkai and the Suvalkiečiai dialects alongside with the Highland and the Lowland dialects. When speaking about the vertical divisibility of language, it should be noted that no more such differences between the perspectives of the ordinary members of language community and sociolinguists have been observed; only the isoglosses of perception are much thicker. It should be noted that although the sample of the research is not large, the participation of the ordinary members of language community in the discussion has been definitely beneficial as it brought in the data contributing to the increasing awareness of the boundary problem both in geolinguistics and sociolinguistics.

This paper investigates the use of literature in ESL reading classes and its role in developing cultural awareness. The theoretical part focuses on the role of understanding students’ own culture as the fundamental step in developing cultural awareness. Thus, reading literary texts is understood here as text interpretation from native and foreign linguistic and cultural perspectives, defined by Kramsch as “third space”. The study presented in the second part of the paper attempts to verify the effectiveness of Hanauer’s (2001) method of Focus-on-Cultural Understanding in developing cultural awareness, focusing on gender perception, as one of the most fundamental aspects of culture. The study describes 1st year English philology students’ work with selected extracts from the novel Japanland: a year in search of wa by Karin Muller. It aims at identifying students’ perception of gender roles in their own culture and comparing and contrasting them with those dominating in other cultures, namely Japan and the United States. Firstly, students’ attitudes concerning gender roles within their own culture are measured by a pre-questionnaire. Then, after reading the selected extracts and expert’s interpretations, students’ attitudes are investigated again in order to verify the effectiveness of the tested method in cultural awareness education. Despite its limitations, the study showed that the application of Hanauer’s method Focus-on-cultural-understanding increased students’ cultural awareness, especially in respect to gender-related issues, and led to their reflexivity on their own native culture.

A Swede making a sandwich will use the word pålägg in reference to what s/he puts on a slice of bread – cheese, ham, sausage etc. In cafeterias in Sweden one can often come across a notice - påtår ingår ‘refill included’. How should the Swedish pålägg and påtår be rendered in Lithuanian? The paper deals with some issues of lexicographic practice arising in the process of compiling a forthcoming Swedish-Lithuanian dictionary. It will include about 30 000 word entries and a large number of expressions. Swedish-Lithuanian lexicography is a rather new field in Lithuania, which has determined the pioneering character of the present investigation. The paper aims at identifying certain tendencies in the search of equivalents to names for food. The words discussed include Swedish examples like knäckebröd, palt, pepparkaka, pyttipanna, pålägg, påtår, pölsa, wienerbröd and some others. The paper also discusses some more general issues pertaining to the field of language and food and some strategies adopted by a fiction translator and lexicographer. The examples demonstrate the complexity of the lexicographer’s task when searching for equivalents to both rather exotic and very simple Swedish dishes, which is be due to the absence of tradition of consuming the dishes by Lithuanians. Despite identical raw food products (potatoes, meat, bread), in the course of history the Swedish and the Lithuanian cuisine have taken differing paths of development and experienced different influences. In some specific cases one can find a rather precise equivalent to an ‘exotic’ dish (cf. SE pölsa, similar to EN haggis, LT košeliena). Meanwhile, a search of an equivalent to some ordinary, casual dish or food product can become a real challenge to a lexicographer resulting in a ‘near’ equivalent with a descriptive or an expository comment, cf. SE knäckebröd, EN crisp bread, LT ‘traški (švediška) duona’; SE wienerbröd, EN Danish pastry, LT ‘sluoksniuotos tešlos bandelė su įdaru’; also cf. SE pyttipanna, similar to EN hash or bubble and squeak, LT ‘patiekalas iš mėsos gabalėlių, bulvių ir daržovių (ypač apie keptus (pietų) likučius)’. The lexicographer’s demanding task requires an interdisciplinary approach, an in-depth knowledge in different fields of research, familiarity with changing culture-specific realia and attention to detail. The field of language and food is rather new in Lithuania. It opens up new interesting research perspectives to lexicography, discourse analysis, culture studies, etc.

In Lithuanian sociolinguistics ethnography is a new method; there are no comprehensive ethnographic studies. The main purpose of this paper is to introduce the reader to ethnography and to show why it is important to include ethnography in linguistic studies and how this method can enrich the analysis of linguistic material. When applying the ethnographic method it is not only possible to provide a picture of the distribution of linguistic variables in the community, but also to discover the social meaning which is associated with those variables. What is unique about ethnography is that it allows the scientist to discover social meanings instead of presupposing them and to examine the construction and organization of the social meaning of linguistic variables. Even though ethnographic studies are often treated as case studies, the results of a well-constructed ethnographic study are reliable and replicable, for instance, the ethnographically discovered social categories and social meanings, associated with them, can be tested in a different community with a help of match-guise technique. Following the sociolinguistic wave theory, I explain how and why ethnography has been employed in sociolinguistic studies. The studies in the first sociolinguistic wave applied survey and quantitative methods to examine the relation between linguistic variation and the traditional social categories – class, age, sex, and ethnicity. However, the quantitative methods were not sufficient enough in explaining which social mechanisms caused linguistic variation. Studies in the second wave employed ethnography in order to find the relation between linguistic variation and locally determined social categories. Studies in the third wave departed from the dialect-based approach of the first two waves, employed stylistic practice approach and examined any linguistic material that is socially meaningful in the community. I also discuss the main aspects of ethnographic method: participant observation, fieldnotes, ethnographic interview and other types of interviews. I come in with advice for researchers who plan to use ethnography in their research. The examples of ethnographic studies that I’m using in my paper are mostly taken from studies of youth language. Nevertheless, the paper can also be useful to any researcher who is willing to conduct an ethnographic sociolinguistic study.

The present paper examines the principles of the language policy designed in the Kingdom of Prussia at the junction of the 18th-19th centuries. This research aims to identify the main factors affecting the introduction of the Lithuanian language as the official regional language in the Kingdom of Prussia and to evaluate the parameters applied to such language planning. The main research objects in this study are the prefaces to Christian Gottlieb Mielcke’s dictionary Littauisch-deutsches und Deutsch-littauisches Wörter-Buch (1800) and the archival material of the end of the 18th century, which provide information on the preconditions, directions, goals, and objectives of the language policy of the time. The politics favorable to the Lithuanian language was preconditioned by the political changes in the 18th century. After the third partition of the Commonwealth of the Two Nations (1795) and with the annexation of Užnemunė to Prussia, the range of the Lithuanian language use expanded, and the ideas of regional particularism strengthened. Christoph Friedrich Heilsberg, the author of the third preface to Mielcke’s dictionary, a counsellor in the Königsberg Chamber of War and Domains, and an inspector of East Prussian schools, was well aware of the Lithuanian attitudes to the influence of language on identity, motives for language learning, legislation, and the potential of schools and churches. On the grounds of this versatile expertise, he undertook language status planning. With regards to Mielcke’s observation about civil servants who need to learn Lithuanian and the Lithuanian approach to language, Heilsberg took a practical position on language planning. He suggested expanding the Lithuanian language use in the public sphere rather than considering the idea of German as a common state language. At Heilsberg’s initiative, the Lithuanian language had to be used in such important areas as education, church, law, business, and administration. Heilsberg sought to ensure that it did not lose its cultural or administrative functions. Such plans presuppose the status of Lithuanian as an official regional language, equivalent to linguistic autonomy, where the language of a national minority has political autonomy and coexists with the official language of the state. Heilsberg initiated not only the development but also the implementation of language policy. He developed the directions and measures of corpus planning: to help non-Lithuanians to learn Lithuanian, he encouraged Mielcke to prepare a Lithuanian-German and German-Lithuanian dictionary and supervised the publication of a Lithuanian grammar and a collection of sermons. This highlights the priorities of his education policy, which aimed to develop the language skills of teachers and priests, and to create conditions for civil servants working in the province to learn the Lithuanian language. Three statements of Heilsberg as a high-ranking state official were important for increasing the prestige of the Lithuanian language: 1) language is a guarantor of identity; 2) provincial languages must be learned by civil servants and not vice versa; and 3) language must be nurtured. The author of the fourth preface to Mielcke’s dictionary, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, raised the criterion of language purity. Considering that only pure language is important for the maintenance of the nation’s distinctiveness, for science, and especially history, he emphasized the need to preserve the purity of language and proposed two ways to achieve this: to use pure language in schools and churches, and to expand the domains of its use. This is the earliest attempt in the history of Prussian Lithuanian culture to give the Lithuanian language the status of an official regional language. Such policy ensured its functioning in all spheres of public life, its use in the education system, and created conditions for maintaining identity.

In the paper the method is presented how to update traditional digitalised dictionaries based on comparison of the dictionary lemmas and a big corpus. Hunspell platform is used for generation of all the word forms from the dictionary lemmas. 6th edition of The Dictionary of Modern Lithuanian was chosen for its comparison with the lexical data from The Joint Corpus of Lithuanian. The outcome of the comparison was two lists of non-overlapping lexis: the list of the dictionary lemmas unused in the present-day Lithuanian and the list of the dictionary gaps, i.e., frequently used words and word forms ignored by the dictionary. The latter is discussed in greater detail to give lexicographers a clue for updates.

This article belongs to the interface of terminology and translation studies and aims to describe the principles of meaning construction in the translation of field-specific terms in biodynamic osteopathy. The central problem of the study presented in this paper deals with identification and analysis of measurable components of meaning of terminological units. The data for the study comprises a corpus of 210 English terms in the field of biodynamic osteopathy translated into French, Italian, Russian and Latvian. Following the analysis of the meanings of the terms through their contextual uses, it is possible to assess other factors that contribute to the content of these units. Methodologically, we built a definition for each term based on its context. Next, we investigated the notion of semantic resonance that is relevant for terminological units derived from general language. The study suggests that even in the field of neology where the concepts are borrowed together with the terms, resonance can vary from one language to another, which, as a consequence, highlights the problem of cross-linguistic equivalence in the translation of texts in this field.

This study aims to analyse the notion of politeness through the collocations of the adjective polite and its Polish equivalents, i.e. grzeczny and uprzejmy, chosen as cultural keywords in order to verify and expand the conclusions of my previous research on the noun politeness. The study has a double perspective. It is based on a linguistic corpus-based analysis of French politeness in a contrastive approach to French and Polish data. Also, the study considers ways of integrating such data into foreign language teaching. The research is carried out on three corpora: the French language corpus Frantext, the National Polish Language Corpus (NKJP) and the Leipzig Corpora Collection. The study includes the analysis of frequency classes of the three words and their most frequent collocations identified on the basis of different measures of association between co-occurring words. By integrating the results of this linguistic approach into language teaching, it is possible to clarify certain semantic subtleties of the words polite, grzeczny and uprzejmy and explain to the learners why these words are not perfect equivalents, or how linguistic analysis reveals cultural differences. Complex approach promoted in this paper may contribute to the development of the intercultural awareness in foreign language teaching and cultural mediation.

This paper describes the social value of the global English language as identified in the investigations of various communities worldwide and shows how the social meanings of English relate to each other in a broader ideological field universal for today’s locally global world. The notions of indexical field (Eckert 2008) and bivalent indexicality (Cotter, Valentinsson 2018) are applied in the analysis. The aim of the study is to synthesize results obtained by different researchers from different ideological and communicative contexts and to explore the indexical potential of English, including its local varieties and mixed speech styles. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of a corpus of secondary sources, consisting of a total of 74 scholarly publications from the Expanding Circle communities, which were published in English in 1990–2020 (most of them during the second decade of the 21st century). In total, more than 50 social meanings of the global English language have been identified. It is likely that the abundance of social associations with English is due to the strong first-order indexes. Hence, the social meanings were grouped into the following nine indexical categories based on the presumed first-order sociocultural indexicalities: British and American culture; International sphere; Technologies, science and education; Economic and social status; Personal capital; Youth; Popular culture and media; Urban sphere; and Male. Positive social meanings dominate the indexicalities, but for some of them, bivalent indexicality (presence of contradictory positive and negative values) has been recorded. Although there is much overlap between these relative categories, the constellation as a whole is interpreted as a complex of several separate and multivalent indexical fields. It is to be hoped that this study not only illustrates that the notion of indexical field is applicable for analysis of the imagined global community of users of English, but also provides a broader ideological context for further research of the social meaning-making potential of the global English language.

Sociolinguistic research shows that Lithuanians in the diaspora notice changes in their mother tongue, especially vocabulary. Therefore, there is a need to study L1 vocabulary attrition in the Lithuanian diaspora. Since one of the main directions of current emigration is Ireland, this article seeks to answer the question of whether the signs of vocabulary attrition can be observed in the language of the first generation of Lithuanian emigrants living in Ireland, and to provide some insight into what factors might influence this trend. This paper describes and analyzes the results of the vocabulary size test of 100 Lithuanians living in Ireland and the answers to the questions of a sociolinguistic survey. The survey involved adults who left Lithuania at the age of 12 or older and consider Lithuanian as their mother tongue. The data of the target group are compared with the data of Lithuanians living in Lithuania (LL) (100 respondents). The results of both groups are compared by applying the T test, and the influence of sociolinguistic factors on vocabulary is estimated by applying regression analysis. The results have revealed that the Irish Lithuanian (IL) vocabulary is smaller than that of Lithuanians living in Lithuania (in average 60,300 and 62,100 words, respectively), and this difference is statistically significant (p = 0.048). The empirical analysis has revealed that education does not affect the size of the IL vocabulary but is significant for the LL vocabulary. The difference in vocabulary size between the IL and LL groups is mainly due to the results of those with higher university education, while the results of those with lower education are very similar in the two groups. However, the IL vocabulary positively correlates with the age of the respondents at the time of the survey (p = 0.01) and the age at the time of emigration (p = 0.006). Thus, it can be assumed that the IL vocabulary continued growing while the respondents were still living in Lithuania, but after emigration their L1 vocabulary stopped increasing. Lack of communication in Lithuanian with people in Lithuania has a negative impact on the respondents’ L1 vocabulary. Considering these results, it can be argued that there are signs of vocabulary attrition in Irish Lithuanian L1.

The paper aims to analyse and compare children’s acquisition of phonotactic patterns in two regional areas in Lithuania: Southern Samogitia and Western High Lithuania. The sample of the study consisted of 48 children: 24 children living in Kelmė (representing the Raseiniškiai subdialect of Southern Samogitian) and 24 children living in Kaunas area (representing the Kauniškiai subdialect of Western High Lithuanian). The data was collected using a non-word repetition test task in Lithuanian. In general, since in Lithuanian dialects vowels differ more than consonants, the pronunciation of vowels serves as one of the main criteria used to define dialects. The main dialect divisions are based on the variants of the stressed diphthongs uo and ie when they occur in the non-final position in a word. In the Samogitian subdialects, the vowels o and ė are pronounced as uo and ie (for example, kuoje [= koja] and dieti [= dėti]); the diphthongs uo and ie are pronounced as long vowels ū and ī. The results of the current research have disclosed that some features of the Raseiniškiai subdialect of Southern Samogitian prevail in children’s language. For example, instead of the vowel o, children employ uo: geluoša [= geloša], talabuosa [= staligosa]; instead of the vowel u, they opt for uo: lasmuove [= lasmuvi]; and instead of the vowel e, they tend to use ei: šveila [= švela]. The results of the research also demonstrate that Lithuanian children apply the typical universal strategies of pronunciation simplification, mostly substitution and omission; other strategies, such as consonant assimilation, metathesis, sound migration to another syllable, and sound addition, were much less frequent.

This study investigates functions of code-switching based on the model proposed by René Appel and Pieter Muysken. Code-switching is an interesting sociolinguistic phenomenon characteristic to bilingual and multilingual communities. It involves the use of different languages within the boundaries of a single sentence or between sentences in one specific domain or discourse. It is an individual language choice determined by such factors as the topic, the situation, the participants of a conversation, their interrelationship, emotions, and demonstration of one or more identities. On this basis, Appel and Muysken (2005) identified six functions of code-switching: referential, directive, expressive (related to identity), phatic (metaphorical), metalinguistic and poetic. This paper sets out to achieve several goals: (a) to find out which of these functions appear in the Facebook discourse of young people originated from Šalčininkai district, (b) to identify the main types of functions in girls’ and boys’ profiles, and (c) to study the frequency of the functions with regard to the variable of gender. The research material consists of 1 048 posts and comments published in 2017–2018 and obtained from 30 Facebook profiles. The dataset represents young people aged between 20 and 30 years, with Polish as their school language. Facebook posts and comments are investigated from a qualitative and quantitative perspective. The research results show that functionally code-switching is similar in both girls’ and boys’ Facebook discourse. On the profiles of both genders, the number of functions is identical, but the frequency of these functions varies. In the datasets of both genders, the most predominant function is directive, which appears when languages change depending on the language chosen by the interlocutor. This research could be informative for sociolinguists who investigate electronic discourse of young people from South East Lithuania and for those who focus on how environment influences the emergence of different linguistic codes on Facebook. The research could also stimulate greater interest of sociolinguists in the conversational features of residents in Šalčininkai district.

The article seeks to investigate the main reasons that cause inharmonious early bilingualism in inter-ethnic Lithuanian emigrant families. The data consist of extracts from 25 semi-structured interviews with Lithuanian women and Facebook comments of such emigrant mothers. Firstly, the study identifies the reasons why some informants themselves do not speak Lithuanian in their families, which leads to their children not even being able to understand it. These reasons can be lack of knowledge about the nature of early simultaneous bilingualism with a minority language, weak or negative attitudes towards Lithuanian and / or Lithuania, urgent need to fully integrate, influence of non-Lithuanian speaking partners, dominance of the majority language over bilingual mothers, and children’s passive bilingualism or insufficient comprehension skills. On their part, children can be growing up passively bilingual because of the minority language input shortage, not enough possibilities and real need to practice it in their daily lives, and because mothers tolerate bilingual conversations with certain discourse strategies. Finally, this paper examines the factors determining underdeveloped or attriting competences in the minority language. Children might be able to participate in very simple colloquial conversations in Lithuanian but cannot express themselves more freely in it or on different topics. They lack higher quality and more various input, e.g. through books or films in the Lithuanian language. They protest against minority language classes, where they could have a chance to learn to read and write in the minority language and further develop their skills. The analysis has revealed a variety of different reasons and their complex combinations that contribute to inharmonious bilingualism with Lithuanian as a minority language. They are objective and subjective, primary and secondary, sociolinguistic, psychological, pedagogical, and maybe some other reasons. A crucial role is played by mothers’ negative emotions in the face of struggles and children’s resistance, which also negatively affects success in bilingual child-rearing.

The noun phrase (NP), one of the key elements of a sentence, can reveal the characteristics of a learner’s linguistic competence. The present study focuses on actual decomposition of NP in the predicate construction. This is when the attribute elements of a noun phrase are included in the predicate construct as factor-actualized determinants. In this position, the copula verb is merely a grammatical means of allowing the attribute to become a predicate (Gaulmyn, Basset 1991: 177). The aim of the study being a more thorough investigation of the criteria and peculiarities of producing this type of predicate constructs in learner language, the present research is based on the empirical material from the Lithuanian learner corpus. The paper briefly discusses the concept of the predicate construction and describes the process of compiling the learner corpus as well as the principles of data selection. The analysis of the NP in a predicate construction is then presented, and the characteristic cases from the corpus data are examined. The main limitation of the present study is related to the scope of the learner corpus. Having summarized the results of the quantitative and qualitative research, the following conclusions were formulated. The learner language is dominated by NP predicate constructions with an adjective more often than a noun. As to the verb conjunction, the typical attribute verb être ‘to be’ was the only one widely used in the corpus under investigation. The analysis of the corpus data also revealed a number of specific errors that are typical of the learners’ written language. In general, the predictive constructions in the learners’ language are characterized by the omission of redundancy tags in the grammatical categories of gender and number. The analysis of the learner corpus provided a broader look at the NP in a predicate construction, highlighting the simplicity, conciseness and repetition of this construct. The results of the study are important for a more comprehensive description of the learners’ language, for solving problems in foreign language analysis, and for contributing to the quality of teaching and learning the French language.

This paper aims to answer the question about the vocabulary size of an adult native speaker of the Lithuanian language and to check which sociolinguistic factors have a significant impact on the size of the vocabulary. The material for this study consists of 132 responses given to a sociolinguistic survey and a vocabulary size test. The data was analysed using the statistical R-Studio program. T-test and regression analysis were also applied in the research. Participants of the study were divided into two age groups (the younger and the older) as the adult age range is very broad. In total, the younger group consisted of 68 participants: 31 females and 37 males. The average age of this group is about 22. The older group consisted of 64 participants: 30 females and 34 males. The average age of this group is about 49. The study has revealed that the vocabulary of a younger native speaker (about 22 years old) is about 57,490 words and that the vocabulary size varies between 42,021 and 72,703 words. It has been found that the vocabulary of an older native speaker (about 49 years old) is about 60,770 and that the vocabulary size varies between 46,690 and 76,705 words. Regression analysis data shows that such factors as education, knowledge of foreign languages and reading fiction have a significant impact on the size of vocabulary. The study has also revealed that the size of the vocabulary is significantly larger for participants with a Master’s degree. Furthermore, the vocabulary size is larger for those individuals who know several languages which may not necessarily share any vocabulary with the Lithuanian language. Regression analysis data also indicates that reading fiction can significantly influence the size of vocabulary and that the vocabulary is larger for those participants who read sometimes, often or daily. It must be noted that the sample of participants in this study is relatively small, so all the findings and insights need to be verified by expanding the study groups.

The aim of this paper is to present a pilot study which applies the framework of Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA, Hanks 2004) to analyse some Lithuanian verbs which form part of the basic vocabulary. CPA draws on the insights of the corpus-driven language analysis and contextual and functional theory of meaning: a meaning of a word is associated with a specific lexical and grammatical environment, e.g. corpus patterns which represent an interconnection of lexical and grammatical elements. The CPA procedure is one of the several corpus-driven methods differing from the pattern grammar (Hunston, Francis 2000) in the way that CPA not only uses typical grammatical categories (e.g. word classes) but also introduces semantic values (e.g. semantic types) to distinguish different senses of a word. Semantic types are often the main separator of meanings, especially when two verb senses are associated with the same grammatical pattern. Concerning learners’ dictionaries, CPA could provide learners with more detailed usage data, and this could lead to a better understanding of meaning differences, important both for language reception and language production. After introducing the CPA methodology, we present the CPA analysis of two Lithuanian verbs, namely, the inductive procedure followed to observe and define meaning-related patterning. We also discuss the problematic issues related to the application of CPA as identified in this study and mentioned by other CPA practitioners. First, observing and defining corpus patterns is a challenging task for lexicographers, especially because of the pattern / meaning division and generalizations related to semantic types. The second problematic aspect is automatization in the process of pattern recognition. The third issue relates to foreign language learners as a target group: meaning-related patterning observed in the data has to be presented in a learner dictionary in a user-friendly way.

Vagueness is a controversial issue, which was long stigmatised by both researchers and laypeople and largely neglected in linguistics until the publication of Channell’s (1994) study, which demonstrated that vague language (VL) is a multi-faceted phenomenon of high pragmatic importance. The present study focuses on one of the most central categories of VL in Lithuanian, i.e. vague quantifiers, which can be defined as non-numerical expressions used for referring to quantities, e.g. daug (“a lot”), mažai (“little/few”), keletas (“several”), or šiek tiek (“a little bit”). The meaning of quantifiers frequently encodes some evaluative content concerning the significance of a quantity. The evaluative function is an important and intended speaker’s message, expressed by choosing a vague expression, and is lost if reformulated into a precise expression. A systematic account of this pragmatic category has not been carried out yet in Lithuanian, and the vast majority of research on vague quantifiers focuses mainly on English with only very few exceptions. VL is omnipresent and is used in all discourse types, but to a different extent and for different purposes; therefore, this investigation has a two-fold aim: (a) to determine the distribution of quantifiers in different discourses including spoken interaction and a variety of written texts (i.e. academic texts, newspapers and magazines, publicist texts, administrative texts, and fiction); and (b) to overview when and why vague quantifiers are prioritized over precise numerical references. The data for this investigation has been obtained from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language (tekstynas.vdu.lt), which is a reference corpus comprising over 140 mln words; it represents five major discourse types analysed in this paper. The present analysis has been carried out within the framework of corpus linguistics, pragmatics, variationist sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis; it is primarily quantitative, but to explain some dominant tendencies in the results, it also deals with some qualitative aspects. The findings obtained from spoken and written discourse have revealed that quantifiers are distributed very unevenly in the two modes of language; the results have also shown some dramatic differences in the use of quantifiers in different written texts. Their distribution and functions depend on the formality of quantifiers and their semantic type. Multal quantifiers (i.e. those referring to large quantities) are emphatic, whereas paucal quantifiers (i.e. those referring to small quantities) are mainly used for mitigation and are more prone to soften the effect of negatively loaded lexemes. Importantly, quantifiers are used for persuasion since they evaluate a quantity and convey the speaker’s interpretation of its significance. They can be important in discourse structuring, in shaping interpersonal relationships, and as a face-saving strategy. Due to the large variety of communicative functions that quantifiers can perform, they are an important category in second language teaching and should be adequately dealt with in lexicography.

Le but principal de cet article est de montrer les principaux problèmes de la lexicologie moderne aussi que d’améliorer l’enseignement de la lexicologie comme cours universitaire en tenant compte de nouvelles théories apparues à la fin du XXe siècle. L’enseignement moderne exige l’introduction de nouveaux termes comme éponymie, énantiosémie, méronymie, etc., et la révision des théories et des thèmes dits classiques comme polysémie, évolution sémantique, formation du mot, emprunt. L’auteur se propose de montrer le développement des théories et des approches lexicales au cours des XXe et XXIe siècles. On estime qu’il faut fournir aux étudiants des renseignements sur les nouvelles orientations et les différentes méthodes existant dans la linguistique contemporaine, avant tout sémiotiques, cognitives, discursives, contrastives, même si elles sont présentées sous diverses versions parfois contradictoires. En même temps, une consultation des manuels de lexicologie montre que plusieurs phénomènes connus restent en marge de leurs études, il s’agit avant tout du calque, du mot international, de l’occasionnalisme, de l’archaïsme sémantique, etc. Donc, l’emploi et la définition corrects du terme, la précision de ses particularités au sein de son paradigme sont indispensables pour l’étude lexicologique contemporaine. L’approche principale est de présenter le vocabulaire français en tant que système spécifique d’unités nominatives. Teaching FFL lexicology: opening new approaches The main aim of this paper is to show major problems of modern lexicology as well as to improve the teaching of lexicology at the university by taking into account new theories that appeared at the end of the 20th century. Modern education requires the introduction of new terminology such as eponymy, enantiosemy, meronymy, etc., and the revision of the so-called classical theories and themes such as polysemy, semantic evolution, word formation or borrowing. It is also essential to introduce several topics and approaches including, above all, field theory, connotation theory, the problem of the concept, cognitive semantics, prototype theory and stereotype theory, linguistic and cultural aspects, semantic universals, etc. We seek to identify the main problems posed by the study of French vocabulary, to show the development of theories and lexical approaches during the 20th and the 21st centuries. It is thought that students should be provided with information on the new orientations and methods existing in contemporary linguistics, primarily semiotic, cognitive, discursive and contrastive, even if presented in different or even contradictory versions. At the same time, an overview of lexicology textbooks shows that several rather well-known phenomena remain on the margins of study; these include calques, international words, occasionalisms, semantic archaisms, etc. Therefore, adequate definitions of terms and their use, precise identification of their peculiarities within relevant paradigms in contemporary studies of lexicology are indispensable. Key words: lexicology; French; teaching; approach; theory of the word.

The article analyses Lithuanian metaphorical legal terms, which account for about 8.8 per cent of all legal terms in Lithuanian. Based on formal linguistic attributes, four main groups of metaphorical terms were identified: (1) terms with a metaphorical headword, which subsumes two groups distinguished according to the part of speech: (a) noun metaphors, e.g. įstatymo spraga ‘a gap in the law’, teisės šaltinis ‘source of the law’; (b) verb metaphors, e.g. laikytis įstatymo ‘to keep to the law’, paremti įstatymo projektą ‘to support a bill’. In this article, differently from a fairly well-established tradition of Lithuanian terminology, verb-based phrases with a special meaning are also classified as terms; (2) terms with a metaphorical subordinate constituent, e.g. sunki bausmė ‘heavy punishment’, juodoji rinka ‘black market’; (3) metaphorical expressions, e.g. Delavero efektas ‘Delaware-effect’; (4) metaphorical compounds, e.g. pilnametystė ‘full age’. The paper has identified four trends of metaphoricity in Lithuanian legal terms (1) conceptualising legal issues as things or objects (67.04 per cent of all metaphorical terms), e.g. duoti parodymus ‘to give evidence’, įstatymo ribos ‘limits of law’, tuščias grasinimas ‘empty threat’; (2) conceptualising legal issues as humans or animals (18.59 per cent), e.g. sąžiningas procesas ‘fair trial’, diplomatinis imunitetas ‘diplomatic immunity’; (3) conceptualising legal issues as objects or humans (12.88 per cent), e.g. bylos sustabdymas ‘stay of proceedings’, aukštesnioji instancija ‘higher instance’; (4) conceptualising legal issues as some natural phenomena (1.63 per cent), e.g. teisės šaka ‘branch of law’. The conceptual metaphor analysis has shown that the target domain of legal metaphors mostly includes abstract concepts referring to legally regulated human activities and relations. The most productive source domain of these metaphors includes (1) objects of the material concrete world around us, mostly things, their attributes and functions, and human actions closely linked to them, and (2) living beings with their physical and mental characteristics.

This paper examines and compares Danes’ and Lithuanians’ code-switching on Facebook. Currently Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms, where a lot of human communication occurs. The language on such platforms is similar to spoken language in its informality, yet it is written and is therefore at least somewhat planned. This research was carried out by collecting status updates and their respective comments from Facebook profiles of six well-known people (three people from each country) and their followers. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analyses, it seems that the way Lithuanians and Danes switch codes is mostly universal and used to achieve similar purposes. The most common foreign language for code-switching in each dataset was English. Both Danes and Lithuanians switched between their respective native and foreign languages in order to mark discourse, emphasize a point, attract reader’s attention, show identity and refer to a different context. However, while code-switching between the native language and English was used for all these purposes, other languages were chiefly used to refer to different cultural contexts. In the future, more research on how Lithuanians code-switch on Facebook could be carried out, possibly focusing on smaller groups of people, and thus being able to make ethnographic observations.

The article aims to discuss the verbalisation of emotions in the discourse of a multilingual person. First, an overview of linguistic investigation in the field of emotions is presented. Notably, linguistic expression of feelings in every given language sometimes lacks precision; moreover, the names of emotions in various languages do not correspond. This poses some problems for multilinguals who try to express their emotions in L2. Later, the paper focuses on a case study, mainly on a series of examples from the manuscript of Diary (1904–1910), an egodocument from the beginning of the 20thcentury written by a multilingual student Vytautas Civinskis. The Diary was written mainly in Polish, Russian and Lithuanian. Civinskis was inspired to classify his own emotions by his studies in psychology. The examples show that while writing about his emotions the diarist makes use of lexical units from various languages (Polish, Russian, German, French, Lithuanian), often not matching the language of the sentence. Presumably, he chooses not to translate the words incorporated in idioms or collocations and avoids translating the names of emotions, which are especially salient in some given language. The diarist is keen to quote the texts of literary and other origin; therefore, he sometimes names his emotion after the line of a well-known poem or a song (such quotations are also kept in the original). The observed tendency to code-switch while talking about emotions corresponds to the results of some experiments carried out by the researchers of bilingualism. The case study also shows that research into emotion names in the discourse of multilinguals should rely on the results of research from the fields of lexical valency, semantics and psychology.

The paper aims at providing insights into sociolinguistic factors which affect the understanding of the first-generation emigrants that their L1 is different (or not) from Lithuanian used in Lithuania. The data for the analysis comes from the project The Language of Emigrants (2011-2013, coordinator Meilutė Ramonienė, funded by The State Commission of the Lithuanian Language). The data from the surveys were analysed using SPSS (version 20). Answers to the target questions of 1,491 first-generation emigrants were analysed. As the assumption was that the perception of change in one’s L1 can be a reflection of the L1 attrition of that individual, seven factors that could play a role in this change based on the previous studies were chosen for the analysis. The analysis revealed that five factors played a role in the perception of change of one’s L1: 1. The length of the stay abroad: the longer the respondents lived abroad, the higher percentage of the respondents claimed that their L1 was different from the Lithuanian language used in Lithuania. 2. The age of the respondents: older respondents more frequently thought that their L1 had changed. 3. Gender: fewer men perceived their L1 as different. Also, the interplay between gender and occupation was important. 4. Contact with the L1 in the country of residence: the general use of L1 in the country of residence played a role in the perceptions, especially the use of L1 at home. 5. Ethnic identity: respondents who strongly identified themselves as Lithuanians perceived the difference of their language. The answer to the question which factors were the most important for perceiving the change in one’s L1 can be informative for answering the question what influences a faster or slower loss of L1 when living in emigration; however, to answer this question, analysis of actual language performance of the emigrants would be necessary. It has to be acknowledged that some of the analysed subgroups were rather small; therefore, insights about them should be tested on a larger number of respondents. Also, a limitation of this study is the fact that during the project The Language of Emigrants, emigrants who intentionally had cut the ties with Lithuania were not contacted; therefore, the data does not reflect their attitudes and their perception about their language change. It has to be noted that all the insights only concern the respondents of the participants in The Language of Emigrants project.