On adverbial clauses in spoken Lithuanian

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

Metaphorical somatonyms of northern Samogitians: artefactual motivational model

The article presents the analysis of the onomasiological structure of the metaphorical somatonyms of Northern Samogitians, focusing on the indicators of the source of metaphors. Based on the explicit semantics of the source (lexical motivators), the metaphorical somatonyms of Northern Samogitians belong to several motivational models, the most productive of which is the artefactual motivational model. The basis of the artefactual metaphor is the associative similarity of the object (artefact) and the body part according to various parameters – shape, size, features of structure and materiality, actions, especially repetitive movements.

Some spelling and language features of publicistic works by Povilas Višinskis

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

Orthography of books and their authors at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century

During development of the Standard Lithuanian language at the end of the 19th century, the dialectal basis was chosen first, and the orthography varied yet for another twenty years. This article analyses the dual orthography – of books and personal orthography of their authors. The study is designed to find out whether the books published during that period reflect the orthographic model chosen by their authors; what factors, in addition to the author’s choice, may have influenced the orthography of the books.The influence of printers on the orthography of books during that period was smaller than before, as many authors did the proofreading themselves. Thus, printers were able to change the orthography in cases where books were printed without the author’s knowledge or consent, such as prayer books. If the author chose unusual, rare, or even self-invented characters, a limited inventory of prints could be a serious obstacle to keep their orthography in the book. As the case of Jonas Basanavičius shows, even when the author offered to finance the acquisition of the necessary prints, this was not necessarily done.At the end of the 19th century, books were published as supplements to periodicals. The editors of newspapers Ūkininkas and Tėvynės sargas adapted the orthography of such books to their periodicals. Under the terms of the press ban, it was often important for authors just to print a book, and the spelling model was chosen by the publisher. However, authors such as Basanavičius, who considered themselves the creators of the standard language, took care to present their chosen or created model of orthography in their books as well.As the cases of Liudvika Didžiulienė, Dominykas Tumėnas and Basanavičius show, two orthographic standards emerged during the research period: correspondence was written one way and books were printed another. Hence, it is not always possible to judge the orthographic model chosen by the authors in books published at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century.

The practice of experimental investigations of lexical tones in Baltic subdialects: some of the new insights in methodology

This article provides an alternative way of experimental investigation of lexical tones in the Baltics. The main idea holds on a presupposition that the phonetic basis of prosodic elements in question can be explained in a more appropriate way in terms of a combined analysis of acoustic correlates, rather than a selective one. The lexical tone in this case may be interpreted as a factor which determines the type of acoustic correlation. Ideally, the interdependence of that sort could be defined by mathematical functions. The analysis of the empirical basis provides clear evidence in the favour of such methodological approach. Phonetic data from both, the Latvian (Valmiera) and the Lithuanian (North Žemaitian) subdialects confirmed clearly that the highest level of the tone distinction can be reached by a combined analysis of the pitch slope, pitch jerk and the duration of the long accented vowels. These results have arguably improved the interpretation of the phonetic tone structure and shed a new light on the typological links between the Baltic dialects. Finally, it presupposes that the phonetic nature of prosodic elements in some degree depends on a methodological way we choose for the investigational purposes.

Constructions with the verb EITI ‘to go’ in the 16th century Lithuanian writings

This research investigates the semantics and the structure of the constructions with the verb eiti ‘to go’ extracted from the old Lithuanian written texts, dating back to the 16th century. It aims to examine the meanings and the structure of the constructions that contain the motion verb eiti ‘to go’ within their structure. There is a considerable body of research investigating various aspects of motion verbs in different languages of the world, including Lithuanian. However, no studies have so far targeted constructions with the verb eiti ‘to go’, found in the 16th century Lithuanian writings. The present study is based on the qualitative content analysis, quantitative analysis, and frame semantics methodology. The concordances of the Lithuanian texts have been filtered out from the Database of Old Writings digitalised by the Institute of the Lithuanian Language. The examples were taken from Martynas Mažvydas’ Katekizmas (MžK) and Forma krikštymo (MžF), Jonas Bretkūnas’ Biblija (BB), Giesmės Duchaunos (BG), Kancionalas (BKa) and Kolektos (BKo), Mikalojus Daukša’s Katekizmas (DK) and Postilė (DP).The frames of Motion, State, Law, Eternity, Service, Opposition, Law, etc., evoked by the selected constructions, were examined using the frame semantics (FrameNet Project). The research has shown that the current constructions with the motion verb eiti ‘to go’ can form the core of the mentioned frames. The observation that has emerged from this analysis is that some meanings of the analysed constructions are conserved in the current Lithuanian language while others have already disappeared. This work could be useful for historical linguists.

When traditions meet different approaches: the case of exophoric Lithuanian demonstrative pronouns

This paper aims to review the existing research on the exophoric Lithuanian demonstrative pronouns and to give a short review of other possible parameters alongside the distance that influences the choice of demonstratives as well as the applied methods in the field. It also suggests some key aspects for the analysis of the exophoric use of demonstrative pronouns.

Fundamental study on the sounds of standard Baltic languages: phonetic and phonological differences

The article discusses the most important differences in the sound structure of contemporary Lithuanian and Latvian standard languages, scientific and practical benefits of a fundamental comparative instrumental sound research, reviews possible further innovations in theories and methods of acoustic and articulatory phonetics and phonology, and perspectives as well as tasks of such research.In his monograph Comparative History of the Baltic Languages (2019), Pietro Umberto Dini observes that there is a constant decline in the synthetic structure in the Baltic language systems, most notably as a reduction of the flexural forms of the noun and verb. He argues that the Baltic languages, like all other Indo-European languages, recognise a structural development: agglutination → synthetic → isolation language. According to the author, the isolation stage of development in the Lithuanian language is just starting, and the isolation structure of the Latvian language is becoming more and more pronounced. Pietro Umberto Dini states that “from the Baltic systems, the Latvian language ‘drifts’ faster in terms of structural development, and the Lithuanian language remains the most morphologically conservative of the current Indo-European languages due to the much slower change” (Dini 2019, 577). The author, based on, for example, the growing tendency in the colloquial Lithuanian language to move the accent to the first syllable (where the accent has long been emphasised in the Latvian language), considers that analogous tendencies are observed in both languages, i.e. the Baltic languages are evolving towards convergence. The data presented in this article and the latest synchronous instrumental studies of the sounds of the Baltic languages do not confirm the convergence trends: the sound structure of the Lithuanian and Latvian languages is still quite different (cf. Urbanavičienė, Indričāne, Jaroslavienė, Grigorjevs 2019, 286; see also Jaroslavienė, Grigorjevs, Urbanavičienė, Indričāne 2019). Both Baltic languages are characterised by quantitative vowel opposition, adjective system (polytonicity), sufficiently simple structure of consonant compounds (e.g. CV and CVC syllable types make up 79% of all Lithuanian syllables, see Karosienė, Girdenis 1994, 40), the same phonological opposition of consonants (voting, modal, local). However, the Lithuanian language has a free accent, while the Latvian language has a fixed accent. One of the most important distinguishing features of the current Baltic languages is palatalization: Lithuanian language is characterised by secondary palatalization and opposition palatalised vs. unpalatalised realisation, which presupposes a twice as large inventory of consonant phonemes in the Lithuanian language and, in comparison with the Latvian language, an accurate, precise articulation of consonants.The article highlights certain similarities and differences in the sound structure of the contemporary Lithuanian and Latvian standard languages based on the latest synchronous comparative research of the Baltic sound system: two scientific monographs of the series Sounds of the Baltic Languages in the early 21st Century (Jaroslavienė, Grigorjevs, Urbanavičienė, Indričāne 2019; Urbanavičienė, Indričāne, Jaroslavienė, Grigorjevs 2019), where the sounds of Lithuanian and Latvian languages are instrumentally studied and described according to the same principles. This is an excellent basis to continue the instrumental study of the contemporary Baltic sounds (and to discuss the importance of the research) on other relevant aspects and perspectives (a few new instrumental non-comparative studies already exist, cf. Ledichova 2020); to update and highlight the practical benefits of such studies and audio recordings (by taking into account the assistance in language learning, examining standard language norms, pronunciation tendencies, the importance in medicine, developing tools and instruments for language technology and artificial intelligence), innovations and perspectives of theories and methods. It is a very important incentive to continue instrumental scientific and practical research of Lithuanian sound methodological innovations, drawing increasingly clear prospects for further research.

Variation in translations of biblical quotations in Žemčiūga Teologiška by Simonas Vaišnoras (1600)

The aim of this article is to investigate the translation variations of Biblical quotations in Simonas Vaišnoras’ Žemčiūga Teologiška. This text is a translation of Adam Francisci’s theological tractate Margarita Theologica, and it was published in 1600. From the first sight, it seems that Vaišnoras tried to make his translation as similar to the original as possible. That is why, in many cases, his translation looks literal and a lot of syntactic constructions and the word order in it seem to be closer to Latin than the Lithuanian language. However, a closer look at the translations of Biblical quotations shows a different situation. In some cases, Biblical quotations are translated differently in different places of the text. Those variations include lexemes, word order, morphological features. Some of those variations are determined by the variations of the translation’s source Margarita Theologica. Another group of the variations appear because the author chose to translate not from Margarita Theologica, but from the Luther Bible. Nevertheless, more than a half of the cases (16 from 28) cannot be explained by the influence of translation sources. It shows that Simonas Vaišnoras was quite free translating this text and sometimes let himself deviate from the original. This article also focuses on the nature of variations – they are classified by the levels of language. The majority of variations are made at the lexical level (43 %), a little bit less are at the syntactic level (37 %), and the least are at the morphological level (20 %).