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

The paper aims to review the history of dialectology at Vilnius University since the establishment of the Department of the Lithuanian Language in 1940. To achieve this, we have set the following objectives: 1) to present the teaching of dialectology, 2) to review the dialect material collection, and 3) to examine existing research. Descriptive, analytical, and evaluative methods are applied in the study. The beginning of dialectological research is associated with the name of Antanas Salys. The works of Aleksas Girdenis and Zigmas Zinkevičius are also discussed in the paper, as well as the teaching of the dialectology subject, methods of collecting dialectological material and directions of dialectological research. The paper distinguishes the paradigms of traditional, structural, and new dialectology dialectology, and examines their methodological similarities and differences. The most important conclusions and summaries of the paper are fundamentally related to dialectological paradigms: in more than eighty years since the first dialectology subject taught at Vilnius University, the understanding of dialectology has changed. The stage of traditional dialectology at the University was extremely important, as it produced the most fundamental works that are still used today. The structural dialectology paradigm and Prof. Girdenis Dialectology School that trained a large group of productively working Lithuanian dialectologists has flourished over the years. Currently, the new paradigm of dialectology is making its way, offering new theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of dialects.

This paper analyzes the translations of Antigone by Sophocles and later authors and the performances based on them in the theaters of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It investigates the necessity to translate the Antigone dramas by Sophocles, Jean Anouilh and Janusz Głowacki into national languages and stage them in theaters. The article analyzes how these works are related to the history of the Baltic countries. This paper is divided into three subparts that match the historical periods from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The most important performances of Antigone in the Baltic countries are analyzed, highlighting the individual style of each director and their attention to the form and expression of the performances. The main themes revealed by the artists of the Baltic countries are conscious self-sacrifice for one’s neighbor and individual resistance to conformity and tyranny.

The paper presents the first attempt to compare two short stories – Anna in the Neck by Anton Chekhov and a well-known short story by the Greek author Emmanuel Roidis Psychology of a Husband from Syros. Both texts were published at the same time (in 1895) and are considered to be masterpieces. The initial motivation for such textual analysis became almost a complete coincidence between the plots of the two stories. A series of telling coincidences and contradictions observed between the analyzed stories require some kind of explanation which will allow us to view both texts from the different angle. The paper aims to determine the correlation between the writers’ biographies and the personality traits with the characteristics of the protagonists and the style of story telling.

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

The paper expands on the problem of sustainability of dialecticity, i.e. the conditions and the potential of the dialect codes in the regions of Lithuania based on the data of the project “Distribution of Regional Variants and Quasistandard Language at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Perceptual Approach (Perceptual Categorisation of Variants)”. It aims to reveal whether and to what extent the narrative of an ordinary member of a language community allows to approach regional dialecticity via the dimension of (non)sustainability of dialecticity. The empirical basis for the analytical discourse developed in the paper was constructed from the data revealing the language attitudes of 910 young persons from 21 regional points (which in the etic narratives were estimated as includable into the zone of the already formed (or forming) variant on the basis of the traditional dialect), fixed by applying the instrumentarium worked out in perceptual dialectology (PD). Having generalised the data of language self-observation and acknowledgement of dialecticity in the micro-/macro-environment, it might be claimed that, in the region of Lowland dialecticity, the areas of the sustainable dialecticity dominate: here, no less than 2/3 of the community might be estimated as having the potential to choose and realise the dialect code. The PD research including the young Highland people, which was based on the comparative analysis of the data, concerning the application of the language behaviour of young people and their a priori attitudes toward the spread of the dialect code, led to the observation that the following ab intus estimations of the dialect codes have been constructed: I am more tolerant toward it; I show less attempt at self-identification. It should be stressed that, in the regions of Highland dialecticity, not merely the areas of the sustainable dialecticity have been fixed, where the communal members firmly positioned their identity as active (im)permanent representatives of the dialect code. The emic narratives reconstructed from the PD research data allowed to distinguish the areas of the relatively sustainable dialecticity, where only around 1/2 of communal members might be identified as the active (im)permanent representatives of the dialect code, and the areas of the unsustainable dialecticity where only 1/3 and less of the communal members were apt to recognise their dialect identification. The holistic estimation of both the Lowland and the Highland dialecticity, based on the reconstructed fragments of the emic narratives revealing the tendencies of code adjustment, led to the conclusion that Lowland dialecticity should be claimed as more sustainable. It should be maintained that the concluding remarks are based on the reconstruction of the emic narratives of the group of recipient participants who represent one age category. Therefore, to achieve a more accurate (non)sustainability discourse in dialectology, further steps are required, e.g. the PD research should include the recipients of various age groups; the results obtained in the PD analysis should be compared with the data of direct observation, etc.

Wojciech Piotrowicz (born in 1940) is a Vilnius poet, prose writer, translator, journalist, social and cultural activist. He is the author of several poetry collections and volumes of memoirs. Research on which this paper is based consists of two main parts: we present the writer’s biography, which introduces a representative of the Polish intelligentsia in Lithuania, and an analysis of his lexis from his collection of short stories Moja czasoprzestrzeń (My Space-Time) (2015). The aim of the research is to investigate the lexical layers in the idiolect of the writer. Piotrowicz’s idiolect is the domain where the erudite vocabulary of the standard language blends in with the dialectical vocabulary of the Švenčionys district, in which words of rural life are frequent. In the vocabulary of his idiolect, we distinguish the following groups of lexemes: words from family language, archaisms, dialect words, and postwar Russian borrowings, referred to as “Soviet words”. The multi-layer nature of Piotrowicz’s idio­lect is a result of a complicated reality on the border between cultures, languages, times, and evidence of changes in social stratification. To summarize the research results, it can be stated that the analysis of 179 words (phrases) from the writer’s individual language shows a world of concepts, thoughts, and values that are characteristic of representatives of the intelligentsia of peasant origin, born in the 1940s. The authors of the paper consider that this study is only a contribution toward determining the peculiarities of the Polish language spoken by the intelligentsia in Lithuania in the 20th century, and that this article does not exhaust all issues of Wojciech Piotrowicz’s idiolect.

The present paper reports on the English type nouns kind of and sort of and their Lithuanian correspondences in a contrastive perspective. This paper aims to describe the quantitative and qualitative distribution of the English kind of andsort of, to determine their translational correspondences in Lithuanian as well as to reveal how Lithuanian correspondences correlate with the functions (textual and interpersonal) that kind of and sort of perform in original and translated fiction texts. The research method is a quantitative and qualitative contrastive analysis based on data extracted from the self-compiled bidirectional corpus ParaCorpEN→LT→EN comprising fiction texts. The results show that kind of and sort of are prone to be used NP-internally; however, even in this construction they can feature as DMs. Kind of and sort of function as unambiguous DMs when they completely lose their nominality, i.e. are used NP-externally. The functional and semantic potential of the type nouns is fully reflected by their TCs. Very rarelykind of and sort of denoting a type are translated congruently into a Lithuanian type noun; they usually correspond to demonstrative pronouns. As discourse markers, kind of and sort of are realised by different Lithuanian correspondences which may help establish the common ground between the speaker and the hearer or refer to the previous context, may indicate epistemic imprecision, approximation or downtone a proposition. The high number of zero correspondence shows that the Lithuanian type nouns have not advanced on the grammaticalization path the way the English type nouns have and due to the multifunctionalilty, non-propositionality and context-dependence there is no one-to-one correspondence of the markers under scrutiny.

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

This paper explores the prevailing readings of the Atlantis story. The purpose of this paper is to show how interpretative judgements on the narrator’s intentions, the objectives of the characters, and the genre and the development of the story prepares the grounds for the political understanding of Athens and Atlantis. In this way, I will show how the dramatic framework influences the expression of political thought. I argue that the most important dramatic feature of the story is Critias’ interaction with Socrates and Timaeus, which explains why Critias composes two speeches that are essentially dedicated to the question of political origins.

The present paper focuses upon syntactic peculiarities of an arabographic text by Belarusian-Lithuanian-Polish Tatars. The text is extracted from manuscript P97 which dates back to the 18th century and is now stored at the Central Scientific Library of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences. The object of our study is a compound sentence. The paper concludes that the text under analysis, abundant in bookish constructions, displays no competition between literary Polish of that period, its regional variant and the East Slavic languages at the level of syntax, i.e. in terms of compound sentences.

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

The paper provides an overview of Lithuanian spontaneous speech corpora and certain studies of the acquisition of Lithuanian as a first language. The author focuses mainly on those resources and papers that are published in English and thus can be used by non-Lithuanian speaking researchers as methodological and/or theoretical inspiration for further studies on different languages. Among the spoken corpora discussed in the paper are: the speech corpus Liepa, Sakytinės kalbos įrašų bazė, the Corpus of Spoken Lithuanian. The author pays special attention to the latter as it is closely connected to the development of the Lithuanian corpus of child and child-directed speech. The studies of the acquisition of Lithuanian as a first language are overviewed in the second part of the paper. The majority of studies on corpus data (including those conducted within international cross-linguistic projects) describe the acquisition of grammar by native speakers of Lithuanian. In the most recent research, there is a shift towards new aspects of first language acquisition (including phonology and morphophonology) and new methods (experiments becoming more and more popular).

The subject of the article is related to the author’s work on the international project “Polish Dialects in Lithuania” (“Gwary polskie na Litwie”, 2016–2018). The purpose of this paper was to identify and study lexical archaisms in the dialect material selected by the project group. In the article the concept of ‘archaism’ is interpreted widely: both archaic and obsolete words are considered. In total, it was identified about 200 lexical units classified as obsolete or archaic: proper lexical archaisms constitute approximately 50% of the material (arenda, bachur, czernica etc.), semantic archaisms constitute about 35% (baczyć, cacka, czeladź etc.), and about 15% of the material are lexical word-building archaisms (kradkiem, lenować się, nadgrobek etc.). By comparing the studied material with the data of the historical sources, it was possible to realize that a number of lexemes qualified in some scientific papers as regionalisms borrowed from the Eastern Slavic languages should be recognized as archaisms, once known to the common Polish language. Тhe results allow us to confirm the undoubtedly significant role of the Belarusian and Russian languages in supporting the functioning of lexical archaisms in Polish dialects in Lithuania. About half of the identified lexical archaisms are also known to a number of dialects in Poland.

The aim of the article is to review the development of applied linguistics in Lithuania, analyse the general tendencies of the development of this science, and present the more prominent groups of researchers in applied linguistics, the schools that have been formed or are being formed, and the contribution of some researchers to the research of different branches of applied linguistics. The article focuses on the work started after the restoration of independence of the Republic of Lithuania in 1990, because only from that time onwards did the work of Lithuanian applied linguistics enter the international mainstream of this science. It discusses some of the research and practical work related to the research that helps or has helped in certain periods to solve problems related to language in life. First of all, the article introduces the works on teaching Lithuanian as a foreign language, which are connected with the beginning of applied linguistics in Lithuania, and which have laid the appropriate methodological foundations for the formation of communicative competence, for the development of a new type of textbooks, pedagogical grammars of the Lithuanian language, and for the creation of a system of assessment of competences. After discussing the origins of applied linguistics in Lithuania, the paper discusses the further development of this science. Research in the field of language acquisition, sociolinguistics, language attrition, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, politeness and impoliteness, corpus and forensic linguistics, and other branches of applied linguistics is presented, and the real-life linguistic issues, analysed by Lithuanian researchers, are highlighted. The final section of the article describes the most important works of dissemination of applied linguistics and presents the research journal Taikomoji kalbotyra (“Applied Linguistics”), the international conferences on applied linguistics that have taken place in Lithuania, and the networks of researchers.

After the restoration of Lithuania’s independence in 1990, non-governmental organizations devoted to the linguistic education, the teaching of the Lithuanian language and its popularisation, and the rights of the state language, that had been active during the interwar period, began to be re-established. The most prominent of the organizations restored were the Lithuanian Language Society and the Union of Teachers of Lithuanian Language and Literature. During the years of the restored independence, various new organizations emerged whose aims and activities had more or less in common with those of the Lithuanian Language Society and the Union of Teachers of the Lithuanian Language and Literature. In 1990, the language popularisation periodical “Gimtoji kalba” [Mother Tongue], which had been established in Kaunas in 1933, was restored. The object of the analysis is the information about the activities of non-governmental language organizations published in the restored periodical. The main focus is on the Lithuanian Language Society, a non-governmental organization that was the editor (1935–1937 in Lithuania, 1958–1968 in the USA) and the publisher (1938–1941 and 1990–1996 in Lithuania) of the “Gimtoji kalba”. The aim of the paper is to highlight and summarise the changes in the goals of the Lithuanian Language Society, the development of its activities, and the search for new forms of activities, as reflected in the publications of “Gimtoji kalba”. Descriptive, analytical and summarizing methods were applied. The analysis of the publications in “Gimtoji kalba” shows that the restored Lithuanian Language Society, which at first based its activity on the experience of the interwar period and the language movement of 1968–1988, contributed to the development of the state language surveillance system. The development of the state language surveillance system has led to a change in the direction of the Society’s activities. While at the beginning of the restoration of independence the focus was on language correctness and its maintenance, over time the Lithuanian Language Society became increasingly oriented towards linguistic education of society and promotion of the Lithuanian language.

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian] This paper discusses Xenophon’s political philosophy and its Greek context. One of the major themes running through Xenophon’s works is leadership, which he tackles implicitly or explicitly in virtually all of his writings (be it his philosophical, historical or literary writings). For Xenophon, the leader was important not only as an individual leading the armed forces, but as a leader of a city or a community as well. Bearing in mind the importance of leadership and the role of leaders for Xenophon, the author of this paper tries to show that Xenophon’s political philosophy can be seen as part of his Panhellenic program. The aim of this program is to politically unite the Greeks by making them enter into an alliance in the name of a common Panhellenic crusade against Persia.

For a long time, Aristotle was considered the author of the “Rhetoric to Alexander”. However, in the 16th century, Anaximenes of Lampsacus came to be considered its author. Despite some links between the teachings of the “Rhetoric to Alexander” and those of Anaximenes, the question of authorship remains unresolved.Based on the text of the “Rhetoric to Alexander” that has come down to us, and in conjunction with other intertexts, attempts have been made to determine the extent to which the “Rhetoric to Alexander” may have been influenced by different authors and texts. This paper raises doubts about whether attributing the “Rhetoric to Alexander” to Anaximenes closes the debate on the authorship of this work.

The paper discusses the landscapes of Apollo, Hermes, Pan, and Demeter in the Homeric hymns, analysing how particular landscape representations articulate the gods’ functions and identities, their relationship to humanity and the structure of the Olympic cosmos. It is argued that an in-depth examination of the representation of landscape in Ancient literature reveals patterns of representation that contribute to a deeper understanding of the religious worldview of the ancient Greeks.

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

The paper discusses the results of a pilot study into derivational patterns and semantics of some neologisms referring to persons given in the Database of Lithuanian Neologisms (further also DLN). The research focused on nouns ending in -tojas, -a, -ėjas, -a, -ikas, -ė, ‑ininkas, ‑ė, ‑ėlis, -ė, -ūnas, -ė and -uolis, -ė. Most of these words are suffixal derivatives usually attributed to the categories of nomina agentis, nomina attributiva and nomina professonalia. The analysed suffixes are very different in their productivity. The suffixes -ininkas, -ė, -tojas, -a, -uolis, -ė are very productive, whereas the suffix -ėjas, ‑a, in Lithuanian grammars treated as one of the most typical and productive agentive suffixes, in the DLN have only been attested in a couple of words. The paper also discusses when a new phenomenon should be treated as a neologism and when it is merely a new sense of the existing word, included in some key publications based on the DLN. The investigation draws a conclusion that when analysing current situation and tendencies of word-building the formal principle of classifying neologisms is not operational. According to it, a compositional neologism coinciding with the already existing word is treated as a word with a new sense rather than a neologism. However, in cases when a new lexeme of an already existing word emerges as a result of a new derivational opposition, by building a word from a new or already existing lexeme of the base word, the new lexeme should be treated as a neologism rather than a new sense of the existing word. New senses (semantic neologisms) emerge in cases of semantic development of the word as a result of meaning transfer, lexicalisation and other processes. Another aspect of the present investigation focuses on the relationship between lexical senses and senses of individual derivation. An attempt was made to identify if lexical and derivational senses were the same or whether the former was narrower or broader than the latter. If they were not the same, causes of their divergence were identified. The latter issue might be relevant when analysing further processes of neologism lexicalisation. The paper also attempts to clarify the derivational patterns (origin) of some concrete neologisms and their semantic structure. Such interpretations are appreciated and very welcome by lexicographers, who are responsible for appropriately presenting neologisms in lexicographic publications. Alongside derivatives, analogous, mixed, contaminative formations as well as translations have been discussed. These derivative and formal aspects of neologisms might turn out to be very important in further investigation of larger and more varied groups of affixal derivatives and identifying general features of contemporary word-building. In pursuing the main goal of the investigation, an attempt was also made to discuss in more detail the DLN as a source of new Lithuanian lexis. It has been noticed that the DLN lacks a number of neologisms which are base words for the ones given in the database. They have all been attested on the internet. Such base words in the DLN would help define their derivatives without repeating the information which is inevitably given in the definition of the base word. Seeking precision, some definitions of the neologisms should be revised; for example, definition patterns of nouns should not be used to define adjectives. In some cases, a neologism given in the DLN as a single lexeme should be presented as two different lexemes, for example, the word pilstukininkas, –ė ‘someone who sells or drinks low quality home-brewed alcohol’ should be given as two lexemes representing two derivational categories: nomina professonalia and nomina attributiva. One of the goals of the investigation was concerned with exploring further prospects of researching the derivation of neologisms, posing the key questions and verifying their relevance. Presumably, the results of the investigation could be used in researching the tendencies of deriving neologisms in contemporary Lithuanian and comparing them with the tendencies described in the grammars of Lithuanian of the 2nd half of the 20th century. It would be interesting to ascertain how derivational patterns of neologisms are changing, when the lexicon is inevitably changing due to an enormous flow of information, more intensive communication in smaller communities and in the world, due to new emerging mass media and under the influence of other languages, especially English, which is structurally much more distant than Russian, a language having influenced Lithuanian several decades ago. (Translated by Inesa Šeškauskienė).

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

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

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

The aim of this work is to analyse the challenges that language editors face when editing texts and to investigate the linguistic attitudes and motivation of editors. The paper analyses 10 qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews with language editors. The average length of each interview is 45 minutes. The research material consists of a total of 7 hours of audio recordings of the interviews, the transcribed recordings make up 100 pages of text. The texts edited by the participants vary in their nature: cultural, legal, film texts, scientific, medical, culinary, business, fiction literature and etc. It has been found that language editors face various challenges in their work: for example, difficulties due to late Lithuanian terminology, liberalising Lithuanian language policy. The linguistic attitudes of the editors have been analysed: the participants in the study do not question the idea of language normalization and explain its importance with various arguments. They stress the prestige of the common language and the difference between public and private language. The participants of the study criticise some aspects of the Lithuanian language policy: some decisions of The State Commission of the Lithuanian Language are questioned, as well as language purism. The most important aspect of language editing, according to the editors, is the fluency and clarity of the text. It was found that most of the informants feel that they contribute to the development of the language and influence the language.

The paper presents an interpretation of the autobiographic writings of Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė, a prominent Lithuanian female writer and a cultural character of the late 1890s and early 1900s. The paper analyses why the disabled female writer had never put any stress on her illness in public (in her childhood she had a twisted spine and stayed a “hunchback” for the rest of her life, had a week nervous system, later had a softened knee-joint and barely could walk, and at the end of her life, she hardly could see and hear). Rather opposite, she identified herself with straight positive views – aspiring “to work for the welfare of the public”, “to disregard private interests” – and even ignored her private experience altogether.On the foundation of the contemporary cultural theories of disability (Simi Linton, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Lennard J. Davis), the paper aims to reveal the formation of Bitė’s dual rhetorics which uncovers the history of the writer’s identity and the dramatism of her eternal existence “between”. From the point of view of the disability studies, the paper looks into the life of the writer���s parents’ family, which largely shaped Bitė’s consciousness and predetermined her choices. The paper investigates the link between the Bitė’s family philanthropic ideology and personal circumstances (in addition to Gabrielė, there were four other sick children, in Petkevičiai family); the writer’s parents’ attitude towards their daughter’s disability (lameness was not interpreted negatively, it was generally ignored); the father’s arguments not to allow the disabled daughter to pursue higher education. The paper also discusses the issue of the positive outlook on different nations, languages, cultures and gender and reserved opinions about disability that existed in Petkevičiai family.The paper concludes that the background of the writer’s parents’ family, discussed from the point of view of the cultural disability studies, essentially shaped Bitė’s consciousness, her self-identity, personal choices and the public expression of her views.

This paper analyses and discusses the problem of a feminine identity, as presented in the early works and the cultural position of Ona Pleirytė-Puidienė-Vaidilutė. The paper investigates the earliest writings of Vaidilutė, “Kada rauda siela” and her diary, where she wrote about her relationship with M. K. Čiurlionis. Woman presented here is active, mobile and searching for the purpose of life. The specific female experience, however, is not explicated. Man (brother, friend) is her traveling partner who helps her to search for the Truth. In her diary, man becomes the leader in their relationship and has the biggest influence on her, as she develops her identity as a writer. The reason for this change can be the change of the place where the relationship between woman and man conspire. The equal link is in the mythical place, but when it takes place in a concrete social situation, man always is a leader; he is the one showing the way to a woman. The list of the independent Lithuanians made by historian of culture V. Kavolis, which consists of more than thirty people, includes only two women. The paper states that the gender proportions in the list reinforces the idea that women were excluded from the history of culture twice; the first time, when they did not have the equal opportunity to participate in the official social life and the second time, when the cultural history itself was recorded.

The model of the exchangeable identity is widely spread out in the academic discourse as well as in the common thought. On the contrary this paper deals with the passive identity as the sameness that functions in the corporeality of senses or acts. The passive identity anchored in a flesh in question here is treated as a generator of the declared identity.The following considerations in the paper are based on the novel Blūdas by Julijonas Lindė-Dobilas. The considerations begin with the identity set from the outside; then they cross over to specific experiential fields in which the own incorporated identity is recognized and elucidated for self awareness. The novel Blūdas is interpreted as the text where the national self-consciousness unfolds.

This paper analyses and discusses the signs of metaphysical experience in the work of the contemporary Lithuanian poetess Gražina Cieškaitė. The paper was inspired by Vytautas Kavolis’ provoking thought that in Cieškaitė’s poetry attempt is made to analyse and criticise the key myths of Western civilisation, and female mythology, very old and going back to pre-civilisation conscience, is recreated from the shards of the broken myth of Western civilisation. In this paper, Cieškaitė’s work is analysed in several stages that are reflected in the headlines of the sections. Recognisable are the landmarks of metaphysical thinking, mythical personages and plots; discussed are the outcomes of the interaction of eclectic metaphysical and mythical thinking; finally, an attempt is made at recognising the central idea of this metaphysical lyric and at reconstructing the version of myth so closely linked with this idea. All parts of the paper are concerned with the issue of poetic language, and the key features of Cieškaitė’s poetics are recorded. The paper asserts that in Cieškaitė’s work it is really possible to restore an extremely old version of female mythology, which is embodied in the figure of the goddess Aphrodite that had acquired Promethean creative powers. Yet here metaphysical experiences can hardly be generalised as one comprehensive metaphysical theory. In Cieškaitė’s work, metaphysical thinking based on language and logic frequently yields ground to spontaneous mystical experiences, which are not controlled by either logic or language.

Onomatopoeias — words that echo sounds from the extra-linguistic reality — are usually understood as units representing direct relationship between form and meaning. Lexical onomatopoeias are part of a language system and their meaning can be found in dictionaries. It is assumed that onomatopoeias are crucial in communication by and to infants and are also considered important stylistic devices in poetry. However, they seem to be only marginal in adults’ speech. This paper presents the results of an analysis of the understanding of Slovak onomatopoeias in everyday communication as well as of the stylistic dimension of these expressions in poetry. First, attention was paid to the comprehension of sound-imitating words in context by the sample of 30 native Slovak language speakers. Then, a sample of ten Slovak poems, well-known due to their usage of various sound-symbolic elements (onomatopoeias included) as stylistic devices, was examined to verify the supposed stylistic dimension of onomatopoeias in poetry. The results indicate that the understanding of the real meaning of lexical onomatopoeias depends on the specifics of the context and that onomatopoeias play a less important role in poetry than expected.

This article is a continuation of previous studies of the interaction between the locative inessive and illative constructions in the Eastern Aukštaitian subdialect of Vilnius and Southern Aukštaitian subdialect. This study focuses on one aspect of the interaction between the locative inessive and illative constructions – the competitive use of the locative constructions. The article presents the types of such use, discusses the reasons of their formation and the tendencies of their functioning. The morphological and semantic aspects of the competition of the constructions studied are discussed using the comparative and descriptive research methods, the research is based on the principles of cognitive semantics and perceptual dialectology. Three competitive types of the use of locative constructions are distinguished: 1) in trinary locative constructions verb + pronoun (less frequently – adjective/numeral) + noun, pronoun is used in the illative case, and noun is used in the inessive case; 2) in binary locative constructions, the inessive of the prototypically used noun is replaced by the illative; and 3) in binary locative constructions, the illative of the prototypically used noun is replaced by the inessive. One of the possible motives for the formation of this use is the assimilation of the inessive and illative forms tam and tan of the masculine pronouns after the morphological and systematic shortening of the paradigmatic cases. According to the pronoun example, the competition could also spread in locative constructions with numerals and adjectives. Another possible motive is the identical ending -a of masculine plural inessive and illative cases, e.g., kambariuosa and kambariuosna; laukuosa and laukuosna. However, these morphological arguments do not explain why in some cases inessive and in other cases illative forms are chosen in the constructions, and therefore the paper makes a further assumption that the competitive use of locative constructions may have been caused by the closely interrelated semantic functions of the inessive and the illative, and the strong semantic potential of the verb. The data of subdialects shows that the competition of locative constructions is an ongoing process in the Eastern Aukštaitian subdialect of Vilnius and Southern Aukštaitian subdialect, but it is difficult to predict the future tendencies of the use of competitive locative constructions. The assumption is made that this could depend not only on morphological and semantic linguistic factors, but also on the linguistic attitudes of ordinary language users.

The Baltic verbs, Lith. kláusti ‘to ask questions’, klausýti ‘to listen’, Latv. klàust ‘to ask questions’ and klàusît / klaũsît ‘to listen’ exhibit intriguing morphological and accentological distributions. For a long time, this has interested linguists as shown by numerous previous studies starting with Schulze (1904). Despite several proposals put forward so far, researchers have not yet agreed on a historical interpretation of the acute tone of Lith. kláusti, or on the historical relationship of kláusti to its cognates not only in Balto-Slavic but also in Indo-European languages. In this paper, all the relevant data and hypotheses available to the current author will be examined again, and a more probable historical interpretation will be sought.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, Bernardo Segni (Florence, 1504 – Florence, 1588) published some Italian translations with commentaries on some works of Aristotle. He was not a scholar nor did he have a university affiliation nor could he boast a deep knowledge of Greek language, but he worked in the cultural climate of Duke of the Florentine Republic Cosimo I (Florence, 1519 – Florence, 1574) and of the Florentine Academy, whose aim was to raise the cultural centrality of Florence and its dialect. In this paper I analyze some passages of his translation and commentary on Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea (Florence 1550; reprint Venice 1551). Through this examination some characteristics of the author’s work emerge, such as his didactic purposes, which may be related to the type of his audience, his (poor) knowledge of classical authors and sources, and his tendency towards continuous dialogue with the present.

There is no doubt that commonplaces, so called topoi, or loci, played a very important role both in the ancient rhetorical theory and in practice. They conform to the main part of invention in the rhetorical treatises, such as Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s De Inventione, Topica etc., and they enable an orator to develop his argument in any desirable direction (in utramque partem), and sometimes become the main tool of rhetorical strategy. In his Orator, Cicero claims, that an accomplished speaker, whom he tries to delineate as an ideal, will be perfectly familiar with commonplaces and be able to treat them critically and manipulate according to his purposes. In this paper, on the ground Cicero’s Verrine speeches, I shall analyze how the orator predicts his opponents’ topoi and presents them in a different light, and by criticizing or even by mocking them, he diminishes them in order to strengthen his own arguments. In some cases, e.g. in the Fifth Book of the Actio secunda in Verrem (Verr. 2.5), this becomes the main strategy of speech, and corresponds to the methods delineated in the Orator 49.

The paper presents an attempt to reconstruct the original method of mastering the Modern Greek, created for classical philologists by a talented researcher and classical philologist Jules David. Jules David (Charles-Louis-Jules David, 1783–1854) was the son of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), apparently the most successful and well paid artist in the entire history of France, the creator of neoclassicism. We will try to show that his scientific conception presents an interesting attempt to establish a connection between the ancient and modern state of the Greek continuum. Jules David’s linguo-didactic approach is innovative and unexpected – while discussing the standard of the Greek language, he managed to combine elegantly the descriptive and prescriptive aspects of the language analysis. His main work, the Comparative description of the Ancient Greek and Demotic Languages (Συνοπτικός παραλληλισμός της ελληνικής και γραικικής απλοελληνικής γλώσσης) is a fascinating attempt to establish the parallels of the Ancient Greek and Modern Greek languages. In addition Jules David set himself another and not trivial task indeed – to make classical philologists, dealing with the Ancient Greek, feel that they are dealing with a living language, and not with a dead scheme. We believe that this strategy of David, due to its originality, has not been fully understood by researchers and can be compared with the views of another outstanding neo-Hellenist and philosopher Nikolaj Bakhtin, the brother of philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1884–1950).

Modern opponents of free will often aim to demonstrate its unviability by employing the standard argument against free will, which claims that either determinism or randomness is true, and that both options preclude free will. It is frequently assumed that Epicurus defended free will by positing the swerve as a third, uncaused type of atomic motion. This makes Epicurus vulnerable to criticism via the standard argument by seemingly committing him to randomness. This paper asks whether Epicurus can avoid the criticisms of the standard argument and seeks to show that he is not as vulnerable as first appearances indicate. A closer look at De Rerum Natura 2.251–293 reveals the important role of the independent deliberating mind in acts of free volition, while the claim that free volitions are a basic, sense-perceptible aspect of reality raises the question as to whether the swerve really was Epicurus’ main defence of free will.

In Plato’s later ethics, the key challenge to one’s personal progress is unorderly thoughts and motions of soul. This disorder should be corrected by recognising and repeating the orderly thoughts and motions of cosmic gods. This paper examines the theoretical assumptions of Plato’s later ethics. A closer analysis of the Timaeus reveals a peculiar conception of mathematics, according to which numbers and their relations not only reveal facts about the reality, but also express values and ideals. By learning mathematics human beings come to know the everyday ethical life of cosmic gods and become like them.

The paper investigates writer-reader relationships in the Lithuanian press exploring the genre of the editorial. The pilot study aims to answer the question whether the expression of author stance depends on the type of the publication and the topic of the article. The study is based on 22 randomly selected editorials published between 2010 and 2012 in two different types of publications: the daily "Lietuvos rytas" and the weekly "Moters savaitė". The study indicated that the addressee, the way of expressing author stance and the interaction between the addressee and the addresser significantly differ depending on the type and purpose of the publication. A typical addressee of the "Lietuvos rytas" is a middle-aged, socially active, educated person interested in all fields of the public sphere, whereas a typical addressee of the "Moters savaitė" is a middle-aged woman, concerned about the well-being of herself and her family, interested in health matters, family values, and household issues. The addresser of the "Lietuvos rytas" typically represents himself as an expert of a certain subject. Eventhough the author aims at creating a close rapport with readers frequently employing the inclusive we, it is evident that there is no equal relationship between the addressee and the addresser. The author uses convincing strategies: selecting a fairly personal tone, he tries to involve readers into argumentation and guide them to a particular interpretation. Conversely, the addresser of the "Moters savaitė" attemps to create an equal relationship with the reader, and the link between the addressee and the addresser is much more intimate and dialogic. The paper also offers some further insights based on the qualitative analysis of the data.

On March 6, 2022, Olga Rovnova, a linguist and dialectologist, died after a serious illness. She studied the Old Believers for many years, was a specialist in Russian aspectology, as well as the Old Believers of Estonia and Latin America. She initiated interdisciplinary studies of the language and culture of the Old Believers' chapels of South America, immigrants from China. In 2006–2008 Rovnova organized reconnaissance dialectological expeditions to Old Believer settlements in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Brazil; in 2009, she visited the Old Believers of Australia (Sydney, Brisbane). The results of the researcher's many years of field work are her numerous articles published in various scientific journals in Russia and abroad (a total of more than 140 scientific papers), scientific reports at Russian and international conferences, popular science educational speeches and lectures.

The paper presents the results of the contrastive semantic analysis of the Polish lexeme zielony ‘green’ and its Lithuanian equivalent žalias. The research based on the methodology of R. Tokarski and K. Waszakowa is aimed at comparing the collocability of Pol. zielony / Lith. žalias with names of various objects and phenomena (both in the literal and figurative senses) including the identification of the prototype references and connotative meanings. The analysis has illustrated that in both languages, ‘green’ is interpreted primarily as the color of grass or other plants, but for some shades of green, the color of certain minerals (such as emerald or malachite) can be considered a prototype pattern. Common prototypical references clearly motivate similar symbolic and cultural values of Polish and Lithuanian terms. Pol. zielony / Lith. žalias have similar ranges of use and develop quite convergent connotative meanings, of which there are slightly more in Lithuanian. In both languages, the prototype association with the green of young plants creates the following connotational meanings: ‘young’, ‘fresh’, ‘unripe’, ‘immature’, ‘inexperienced’, ‘healthy’, ‘ecological’. Both in Polish and in Lithuanian, some shades of green can connote not only positive but also negative characterizations, based on associations with the chthonic world or with disease and death. However, such connotations as ‘raw, uncooked’ and ‘nice, pleasant’ are more typical for the Lithuanian language, since in Polish they are rather sporadic. Only in Lithuanian there is the connotation ‘strong, powerful’. Therefore, it must be recognized that the semantic spectrum of the Lith. žalias is wider than the semantics of its Polish equivalent.

The aim of this paper is to present a historical analysis of the concept of narečje (narječje) and diasystem in dialectology since their beginnings on the territory of contemporary Croatia and Serbia until today. These concepts are normally used to denote a dialectological unit higher than a single dialect, and also play an important role when defining standard languages. Regardless of their uniqueness and importance, there is no historical overview of their development. The historical analysis identified two distinct periods: (1) the comparative-descriptive and (2) the neogrammarian-structuralist. The first is ascribed to Vuk Karadžić and the philological school, who understood narečje as contemporary linguistic forms, while the second was started by Aleksandar Belić, who understood them primarily as homogenous proto-dialects, which split into smaller dialects over time. This understanding of narečje remained dominant even during the times Pavle Ivić introduced structural dialectology, as well as in the research of Dalibor Brozović, who introduced the alternative notion of diasystem in the 1970s. The conclusions invite for a revision of the concept of a narečje and diasystem in dialectology and the studies of standard languages. On a practical level, the author suggests that for contemporary varieties, adjectival forms or forms clearly refering to a hypothetical origin should be used (i.e. Štokavian dialects or dialect of Štokavian origin), while narečje, or noun-forms (i.e. Štokavian narečje, Štokavica, Štokavština) should either be avoided or substituted with reconstructed proto-dialect.

The paper studies the grammar features that characterize the Moscow revision of the Book of Needs (Trebnik), composed under patriarch Nikon (1658). The research is based on a comparison of Nikon’s and Peter Mogila’s (1646) Trebniks. The study confirmed the scientific statement that Nikonian editors revised the Trebnik in accordance with the recommendations of the Moscow edition of M. Smotritsky’s Grammar. This is shown, for example, in the use of certain endings in the nominal and adjective declension and of the imperative indicator (in the verbs of the first conjugation in the 1st and 2nd persons of the plural). The emergence of hyper-correct phenomena points at to obligatory character of the corrections. One of the main directions of the Nikonian edition was the elimination of grammatical variability and homonymy. To this end, editors fixed one form for expressing grammatical meaning in those cases when the grammar allowed variations, for example, the use of the ending -ѣхъ in the local masculine and neuter plurals, the elimination of the enclitic forms of personal pronouns in the dative case in the adnominal position and their replacement by possessive pronouns, the use of reflexive verbs to express passive in place of combinations of passive participles with the verb byti (быти).

Фразеологизмы служат действенным средством лаконизации речи и, следовательно, экономии языковых средств. Роль языковой экономии во фразеологии проявляется как на синхроническом уровне (возникновение модификаций фразеологизмов, не нарушающих цельности фразеологизма и норм его использования), так и на диахроническом уровне (закрепляясь в языке, модификации могут превращаться в новые устойчивые выражения, включающиеся во фразеологический фонд). Эти процессы, хорошо изученные в русском языке, недостаточно исследованы в словенском. В статье рассматривается роль языковой экономии в образовании словенских фразеологизмов на фоне русской фразеологии; сопоставляются результаты действия принципа языковой экономии, отмечаются как сходства, так и различия в двух славянских языках. Ключевые слова: словенская фразеология, русская фразеология, происхождение фразеологизмов, языковая экономия, эллипсис, имплицитность. ... Jelena Konitskaya Role of the economy principle in language in the Composition of Slovenian phraseologisms (compared with those in Russian) Phraseologisms serve as a telling resource of economy of language features. The role of the economy principle in language, in its phraseology, appears at the synchronic level (derivation of modifications of phraseological units) and at the diachronic level (derivation of new stable expressions incorporated into the stock of phraseology). The paper deals with the diachronic aspect of the problem. The results of compression (ellipsis, implication) caused by the economy principle in language (in phraseology) have been studied rather well in the Russian language (e.g., works of V. Mokiyenko and others), however, insufficiently in the Slovenian language. The paper comprises an analysis of the role of the economy principle in the composition of Slovenian phraseologisms against the background of the Russian phraseology; a comparison of the effect of the economy principle in language, both the similarities and differences in these two Slavic languages are pointed out. The similarities appear in the derivation of phraseologisms through elimination of the final part of expression (proverbs or phraseologisms of a broader component structure), e.g., Kovačeva kobila je vedno bosa > kovačeva kobila, in comparison with the Russian кто во что горазд, тот тем и промышляет (тот в то и играет)> кто во что горазд. Different constituents of a stable expression may turn elliptic in both languages, e.g., the collocation posipati si glavo s pepelom > posipati se s pepelom, speljati vodo na svoj mlin > voda na mlin, рус. дорого не по карману > не по карману, разбить в пух и прах > разбить в пух etc. In both languages, elimination (ellipsis) of a constituent may cause fogging of the inner form of phraseologisms; e.g., the collocation gledati kot čuk na palici > gledati kot čuk; ne priplаvati po prežgani juhi > ne priplаvati po juhi. Implication of additions in phraseologisms, leading to the derivation of structures with a broken syntactic relationship, is noted in both languages; e.g., Russian безо всяких, наша взяла, и никаких, прокатить на вороных, etc., the collocation ne reči ne bele ne črne, ne biti pri čisti, huda / tenka / slaba / tesna prede (komu), tristo kosmatih medvedov / hudičev etc. Forward pronominalisation may be considered as a separate case of the manifestation of the economy principle in a language, noted in expressions such as ima ga pod kapo (‘быть пьяным’, literatim “иметь его под шапкой”), pobrisati jo (‘убежать’, literatim “почистить ее”), dobiti jih (‘быть избитым’, literatim “получить их”). The paper covers the sight of different possibilities of explaining of the derivation of Slavic expressions taking into account the role of the economy principle in language.

Grigory Miheev The Historical Book of russian Old Believers found in the Daugavpils Region This article presens the description of the old print book of Russian Old Believers found and researched in Daugavpils, Latvia in 2010. This old print of the Book of Psalmes, with some handwritten inscriptions presents an unfinished work of an unknown scribe and restorator of incunable Books of Psalms. The description contains as following: the condition of the book binding and features of preserved part of printed texts, paper and 8 types of watermarks that were found on it. The pictures of filigrees and short details about paper mills, where the similar filigrees were used, are attached. The author provides the reproduction of the font, miniature, colophon, initials, three of publications and two hand written records. The print is identified as being close or similar to the Books of Psalmes and the other books printed by Pyotr Mstislavets, Vasil Garaburda and Mamonichi in the years between 1574 and 1601. The finding has been defined as similar to the “Black Dot Book of Psalms”, presumably printed by Mamnochis printing house in Vilnus. Its closest copy might be considered “The Red Dot Book of Psalmes” printed by Pyotr Mstislavets in 1678 in the same printing house. The date of the described print has been estimated as not later than July, 1600.

The paper sets out to discuss character features attributed to Byelorussians, Latvians, Poles, Russians, Germans, i.e. representatives of neighbouring nations or those most prominent in the history of Lithuania as identified in the world outlook of the Lithuanian language. In other words, the paper aims at identifying ethnical stereotypes entrenched in the world outlook of the Lithuanian language. The data includes all collocations with all the words baltarusiškas (-a), latviškas (-a), lenkiškas (-a), rusiškas (-a), vokiškas (-a) in all their forms collected from the Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian compiled at the Centre of Computer Linguistics of Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas. The results of the analysis into actual usage have been supplemented by the results of the content analysis of international anecdotes. The methodology of research is based on conceptual analysis.The results of investigation have shown that the closest neighbours are unlikely to be the best known. Representatives of Latvia and Belarus, or countries bordering on Lithuania, have been only fragmentary reflected in the world outlook of the Lithuanian language. Poles, Russians or Germans, the latter are usually not treated as neighbours, are much better known. The language world outlook has identified Polish patriotism and sometimes self-esteem going to the extremes. Russians are thought of as open, ingenuous people whose patriotic feelings might overstep certain boundaries and pose danger. The dominant feature of German national character is their inclination to order, sometimes also rather extreme.Such features might be due to several causes. Russians and Poles make up a large part of the population of national minorities of Lithuania, which is why they are seen as slightly closer. On the other hand, Lithuania is historically related to Poland, Russia and Germany.The language world outlook tends to provide more details on negative features. The tendency also applies when discussing the national character of representatives of other nations. Most outstanding features are verbalised hyperbolically and ironically.

The present paper discusses precedent texts in advertisements. A precedent text is defined as an axiological sign functioning within a semiotic space of culture. The precedent text is introduced into any text by giving the name of the author or the character or the title of a literary work or just quoting it. The precedent text is important for a person at the cognitive and emotive levels and is well-known within the person's social environment (both of his/her own as well as previous generations); it is fore-grounded in the discourse each time it is generated by the linguistic person. The authors adhere to the view that an advertisement is a Creole text consisting of components of verbal and visual communication. The approach implies a possibility for other texts, i.e. precedent texts, to occur in the advertisement text. The paper focuses on the meaning and functionality of precedent texts in Lithuanian printed advertisements. The investigation into the diversity of precedent texts and their frequency in advertisements is based on the methodological instruments offered by cognitive linguistics and linguistic culturology. A limited scope of the material could only lead to very tentative conclusions on precedent texts in advertisements. The insights could be treated as prerequisites or hypotheses for further research. So in the discourse of advertising precedent texts tend to be quasi-quoted, there are also clear tendencies to make allusive references to precedent texts (precedent phenomena). The advertisements give preference to a mixed type of actualisation of the precedence phenomena. Undoubtedly, precedent advertisements, due to their appeal to the addressee's cognitive basis, are much more suggestive than denotative advertisements, which are limited to the context of daily life. The interdependence between the functions of advertisements and precedent texts, especially the functions of game and password, facilitates the spread of the message of the advertisement and its preservation in the memories of addressees.

The paper discusses a debatable discourse of phraseology, both written and spoken, and analyses texts of different genres of public discourse. More attention is devoted to the semantic structure of idiomatic expressions and their modifications, i.e. their occasional usage, their shift from indirect to direct meanings, from fixed to free word combinations (co-occurrences) and vice versa. The paper treats the above modifications as a linguistic game: non-standard, at first sight even illogical, usage aimed at hindering the understanding rather than transmitting information, as pointed out by language experts. This might be due to several reasons: to attract the attention of the readership or the audience, to circumvent the law (like in alcohol advertisements) or to avoid being treated as an offender by expressing one's negative attitude to another person. A linguistic game offers numerous opportunities to manipulate, so does linguistic meaning in its numerous extensions and with no obvious boundaries between distinct senses. Occasional idiomatic expressions, insulting taboos and idioms with non-standard implications are well-marked and often require linguistic expertise; however, due to the underlying linguistic game, they cannot be always disputed as regular conclusions. If nonetheless linguistic expertise is sought, it is considered valuable. Still it remains only one of possible stylistic interpretations of a debatable text.

The paper deals with variants of personal pronouns, specifically the third person singular nominative case jis/jisai ‘he’ and ji/jinai ‘she’ in Lithuanian. The existence of such variation has been so far ignored by most linguists. The variation of the use of these short and long variants is analysed within the language “architecture” framework first introduced by G. Berruto (1987) and involving different dimensions, of which the diastratic, diaphasic and diamesic are discussed in more detail. The use of pronouns is studied using the data from eight different written and spoken Lithuanian corpora and the proportions of such use are compared. The analysis shows that the variation in the use of pronoun variants is overwhelmingly associated with the diamesic dimension, i.e., the written language typically uses the short variants only while in the spoken language all four pronoun variants are used. The proportion of the long variants increases as the spontaneity of speech increases. There is a difference, however, in the use of masculine and feminine forms as the long variant of the masculine pronoun is used in one third of the cases while the long variant of the feminine pronouns is found in as much as 80 percent of cases in the spoken variety. Other dimensions do not seem to impact this variation to a notable extent given the data available.

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

This paper presents a translation of Tertullian’s Ad Martyras into Lithuanian language and a brief introduction, which contains a short survey of Tertullian’s life, his audience, i.e., Christians of Africa, selection and motivation of provided examples in Ad Martyras.