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Imperatyvinės kilmės diskurso markeriai lietuvių kalboje: klausyk ir žiūrėk atvejis
Get PDFThe present paper deals with the imperatives of intentional visual as well as auditory perception as pragmatic markers in Lithuanian. The pragmatic functions of the imperative forms of the Lithuanian perception verbs have not been examined yet. Thus, the aim of the paper is to explore the frequency of the imperatives klausyk ‘listen’ and žiūrėk ‘look’ and the way in which they are used.The data have been collected from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language, namely its subcorpus of fiction texts.The study shows that the Lithuanian imperatives of intentional visual as well as auditory perception are multifunctional and exhibit a variety of functions: the directive to listen or to look, the attention-getting device, the argumentation marker, the directive to consider, the interruptive directive and others. The uses that the imperatives under study share are: the directive to listen or to look, the attention-getting device, the directive to change the topic and the argumentation marker. Besides the functions mentioned above, the imperative of intentional visual perception is used to express the speaker’s contradiction to what is said. The imperative of intentional auditory perception, by contrast, cannot fulfil this function.In the subcorpus of fiction texts, the number of the occurrences of the imperative žiūrėk ‘look’ is larger than the number of the occurrences of the imperative klausyk ‘listen’. The relatively higher frequency of žiūrėk ‘look’ correlates with a wider range of uses. As a pragmatic marker, the Lithuanian žiūrėk ‘look’ is most typical as the expressive directive that conveys the speaker’s stance toward visually accessible information or the interlocutor’s speech. Žiūrėk ‘look’ as an attention-getter or an argumentation marker is not as typical as its correspondences in other languages. However, in contrast to its auditory counterpart, the imperative of intentional visual perception retains more of its lexical meaning and its imperative use can be based on such lexical readings as ‘to think, imagine’, ‘to take care of somebody’ or others. Klausyk ‘listen’ in its turn is more typically pragmatic. It most often serves as an attention-getting device by which the speaker seeks to obtain the addressee’s attention. As an attention-getter, klausyk ‘listen’ usually appears in a clause-initial position and it is usually followed by questions.Straipsnyje analizuojamos imperatyvinės percepcinių veiksmažodžių klausyti ir žiūrėti formos bei jų funkcijos dabartinėje lietuvių kalboje, aptariami galimi šių formų pragmatiškėjimo požymiai, bandoma nustatyti kalbamų formų, kaip diskurso markerių, statusą. Atliktas tyrimas yra naujas, nes lietuvių kalbos percepciniai veiksmažodžiai kaip diskurso markeriai kol kas nėra tirti. Empirinės medžiagos pagrindą sudaro duomenys, surinkti iš Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos tekstyno grožinės literatūros patekstynio. Nustatyta, kad, be tiesioginės imperatyvo funkcijos, analizuotos imperatyvinės formos gali turėti įvairių pragmatinių funkcijų: dėmesio atkreipimo, naujos temos įvedimo, temos nutraukimo arba grįžimo prie ankstesnės temos, prieštaravimo, nuostabos ir pan. Šiuo požiūriu klausyk ir žiūrėk formos yra multifunkcionalios, o jų multifunkcionalumas labai priklauso nuo konteksto ir diskurso. Kai klausyk ir žiūrėk formos įgyja diskurso markerio statusą, imperatyvo reikšmė išblunka, į pirmą planą iškeliama ir sustiprinama pragmatinė reikšmė, kuri yra orientuota į kalbėtoją: pasitelkdamas klausyk ir žiūrėk formas, kalbėtojas siekia užmegzti ryšį su pašnekovu ir išreikšti subjektyvią savo poziciją
Object-oriented perception: towards a contrastive approach to evidentiality in media discourse
Get PDFThis paper is a corpus-based study of the evidential realisations of object-oriented perception verbs in English and Spanish written and oral media discourse. The main aim of the study is to analyse and compare the different uses and complementation patterns taken by the English words look and sound and their Spanish counterparts se ve and suena. The procedure followed involves a contrastive analysis methodology: (i) description of data, (ii) juxtaposition and (iii) contrast. The data has been taken from oral and written media discourse corpora in English and Spanish. The study has revealed interesting similarities and differences in the uses and complementation patterns adopted by object-oriented perception verbs in both written and oral English and Spanish, thus making a contribution to a debate in which Spanish has been obviated to date
Evidence (re)presentation and evidentials in popular and academic history: facts and sources speaking for themselves
Get PDFThe paper pivots around the different roles of evidentials and the different ways in which evidence is represented in the discourse of popular and academic history, thereby exploring the dynamics of both genres from a discourse analytical perspective. The analysis is based on two corpora of academic and popular articles on history. In particular, it is focused on those lexico-grammatical resources for tracing the speaker’s source and mode of information that constitute the distinguishing features of the two genres. The analysis shows that the high frequency of saw in popular articles refers to the narrative of history, and to the evidence provided by historical characters and sources, rather than by the speaker. The frequency of the attributor according in academic journal articles, on the other hand, clearly qualifies as evidentiality in the narrative of historiography, and acts as a marker of the importance of sources in historical reasoning. The different frequencies thus seem to be related to the different communicative and social functions of the two genres and to be closely connected with the triptych of narratives (Bondi 2015) involved in historical discourse
On the modal functions of Lithuanian verbs of coming
Get PDFThe verbs of coming and going as a means of modality have been investigated in a number of languages: Russian (Majsak 2005; Bourdin 2014), Latvian (Wälchli 1996, 2000), Estonian (Penjam 2006), Finnish (Kangasniemi 1992) and others. However, with the exception of some observations made by Wälchli (1996) or Nau (2012), the realization of modality by ‘come’ or ‘go’ verbs in Lithuanian has not been thoroughly examined. Thus, the present paper is concerned with a diachronic as well as synchronic variation pertaining to two Lithuanian verbs of motion that contain the root ‘go’, i.e. pareiti ‘come home, return’ and prieiti ‘approach on foot’ as well as their reflexive counterparts. The article seeks to establish to what extent the verbs under analysis have developed modal meanings in Contemporary Lithuanian as well as the earliest period of the language (16th–17th centuries) and to account for the possible diachronic evolution of modal meanings. It focuses on both qualitative as well as quantitative parameters. The data have been collected from the old written Lithuanian texts (16th–17th centuries) and the corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language, namely its subcorpus of fiction texts. The text sample on which the study is based shows that the modal constructions with the Lithuanian verbs of motion based on the root ‘go’ appear in the 16th century. It is only the reflexive forms pareitis(i) (‘PREF-go-REFL’) and prieitis(i) (‘PREF-go-REFL’) that have potential to realise non-epistemic modality: the analysed material did not reveal any instances where non-reflexive forms pareiti and prieiti are used to convey modality. The predominant modal meaning of the reflexive verbs pareitis(i) and prieitis(i) concerns the meaning of participant-external as well as deontic necessity. As for Contemporary Lithuanian, the ‘go’-derived necessive constructions are rather marginal in the contemporary system of modality: the verbs under analysis are more common in spoken Lithuanian or dialects than in written Lithuanian. Moreover, semantic distribution among the reflexive verbs under consideration differs in Old and in Contemporary Lithuanian. Deontic necessity takes the leading position among the reflexive verb pareitis(i) in Old Lithuanian, whereas participant-external necessity predominates among the reflexive verb prisieiti in Contemporary Lithuanian
(Non)epistemic modality: English must, have to and have got to and their correspondences in Lithuanian
Get PDFThis paper deals with the three types of modality – epistemic, deontic and dynamic. It examines the relation between the synchronic uses of the modal auxiliary must and the semi-modals have to and have got to as well as their Lithuanian translation correspondences (TCs) found in a bidirectional translation corpus. The study exploits quantitative and qualitative methods of research. The purpose is to find out which type of modality is most common in the use of must, have to and have got to; to establish their equivalents in Lithuanian in terms of congruent or non-congruent correspondence (Johansson 2007); and to determine how Lithuanian TCs (verbs or adverbials) correlate with different types of modality expressed. The analysis has shown that must is mostly used to convey epistemic nuances, while have to and have got to feature in non-epistemic environments. The findings show that must can boast of a great diversity of TCs. Some of them may serve as epistemic markers; others appear in deontic domains only. Have (got) to, on the other hand, is usually rendered by the modal verbs reikėti ‘need’ and turėti ‘must/have to’, which usually encode deontic modality
A corpus-driven analysis of structural types of lexical bundles in court judgments in English and their translation into Lithuanian
Get PDFFormulaicity is one of the characteristic features of legal discourse, which manifests itself not only at the level of wording, “but also in the content, structure and layout” of legal texts (Ruusila & Londroos 2016, 123). Formulaic language, which includes phrasal and prepositional verbs, idioms, collocations, lexico-grammatical associations, lexical bundles, etc., are building blocks of legal discourse shaping legal text meanings. However, up to now, far too little attention has been paid to the nature of frequently occurring “sequences of three or more words that show a statistical tendency to co-occur” (Biber & Conrad 1999, 183), i.e. lexical bundles, in different genres of legal texts. Most studies in the field of lexical bundles in legal texts have only been based on one language (e.g. Jablonkai 2009; Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011; Breeze 2013), whereas translation-oriented contrastive studies on lexical bundles are lacking. In respect of the aforementioned gaps, the aim of this pilot study is to analyse structural types of lexical bundles in court judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union in English and to examine the way these structures are rendered into Lithuanian. To gain insights into the frequency and structure of lexical bundles, the present study uses the methodological guidelines of corpus linguistics. The classification of lexical bundles into structural types is based on the framework suggested by Biber et al. (1999, 2004). For the purpose of this study, a parallel corpus of court judgments was compiled comprising approximately 1 million words of original court judgments in the English language and about 8 hundred thousand words of court judgments translated into Lithuanian. Lexical bundles in this research were identified using the corpus analysis toolkit AntConc 3.4.4 (Anthony 2015). A concordance program AntPConc 1.2.0 (Anthony 2017) was employed to find Lithuanian equivalents of the most frequent lexical bundles identified in the English court judgments. The evidence from this study suggests that different structural types of lexical bundles have more or less regular equivalents in Lithuanian; however, in most cases, these equivalents tend to be shorter
‘A promise is a promise… but what about threats?’: an English-Spanish contrastive analysis of the verbs promise-prometer and threaten-amenazar
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is to investigate ‘I promise’ and its counterpart in (Peninsular) Spanish prometo. After briefly revisiting the theoretical debate on performativity and performative verbs, the paper adopts a corpus-based approach to quantify the main uses of ‘I promise’ in both languages. This contrastive analysis has an ultimate didactic purpose, since these verbs can raise problems of understanding and use for Spanish learners of English as a foreign language (EFL henceforth) and of translation studies. In order to carry out this analysis, the British National Corpus and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual were used, manually fine-graining the initial automatic search. To make both datasets comparable, only the oral and the fiction sections were considered since they are both shared by the two corpora. Interestingly, during the analysis there has also emerged an unexpected result which seems to be pointing out to the beginning of a linguistic change in Spanish. Thus, it can be observed that there is an emergent use in Spanish of the verb amenazar (‘to threaten’), sometimes with the action function of “promising”. This emergent use seems to be especially frequent in computer-mediated communication (e.g. blogs, forums, etc.) but it is still extremely rare in English
English and Croatian citation practices in research articles in applied linguistics: a corpus-based study
Get PDFAs a mandatory constituent of academic writing, citation allows writers to acknowledge other scholarsʼ work and to position their research against it, showing thus both contribution to previous knowledge and research novelty (Hyland 2004). Previous research has documented not only cross-disciplinary (Hyland 2004) but also cross-cultural variations, with a general tendency of Anglo-American writers to use more citations than writers of some other cultural backgrounds (Hyland 2005; Mur Dueñas 2009). By exploring the frequency, preferred types, and reporting structures of citations in two comparable sub-corpora of research articles in applied linguistics in English and Croatian, the present study aimed to provide an insight into the patterns of cross-cultural similarities and differences in the use of academic citation. The corpus comprised 32 research articles that were sampled from the representative English- and Croatian-medium publications in applied linguistics and analyzed manually. The extracted instances of citations were categorized according to the pre-established taxonomies of the citation types (Swales, 1990) and reporting structures in academic writing (Thomson & Tribble 2001). The frequency analysis showed that the English writers used more citations as opposed to the Croatian writers, which is in line with previous cross-cultural research on the use of citations (Fløttum, Dahl & Kinn 2006; Mur Dueñas 2009). In both sub-corpora writers used more non-integral than integral citations, with the highest frequencies reported in the Introduction section of research articles. The overall findings point to the saliency of the congruent types of reporting structures in both citation formats across the two sub-corpora, with the human subjects being most frequently used in integral citations and non-reporting being the most frequent reporting structure in non-integral citations. However, in non-integral citations English writers used non-human subjects at a significantly higher frequency than Croatian writers, which suggests that in the English citations investigated more importance is placed on research activities than human agents. Whereas similarities in the use of citations between English and Croatian writers may be accounted for by the congruent disciplinary variable, the differences seem to be related to the specifics of a wider socio-cultural background in which academic writing is embedded
Lokalizacijos raiška lietuviškojoje Georgo Wenkerio medžiagoje
Get PDFThe present study deals with the expression of localization in the German-Lithuanian translations compiled by George Wenker in the years 1879 to 1890 in the villages of Minor Lithuania, which used to be part of the German territory. The whole corpus of the translations comprises 59 pages; each page contains 40 sentences written in High German and translated into Lithuanian. Since almost half of the German sentences (their overall number is 557) illustrate localization in space, the present study focuses on 14 German sentences exemplifying spatial relations of different complexity and examines their Lithuanian translations. The aim of the study is to investigate the means of expression of spatial relations in the German-Lithuanian translations, to analyze their motivation and authenticity within the framework of cognitive semantics, namely the theory of meaning construction and interpretation. A comparative method is applied in order to identify the authenticity of the means of expression.In the first stage of the qualitative analysis a spatial scene was identified and illustrated in a general image schema in the German original sentences. The second stage of the analysis involved the conceptualization of spatial relations and their means of expression in the Lithuanian translations. The study explored the inventory of expressions of localization in the Lithuanian translations, their choice and authenticity.The findings show that the trajector or its movement towards a landmark is realized by prepositional constructions. The latter may co-occur with adverbs specifying spatial relations, which are also attested in the German originals. Place or direction is rarely marked by inessive and illative case.A variety of correspondences found in the Lithuanian translations may be dependent on the complexity of spatial scenes attested in the German originals. Simple spatial scenes involving one or two trajectors or their movement towards a landmark are rendered by prototypical expressions. Specified by additional reference to place in the German originals, they are most frequently translated literally. The translations of complex spatial scenes display the widest variety of correspondences which may represent literal or free translation. Prototypical expressions of localization were chosen when translating simple spatial scenes, whereas literal translation was more common when rendering complex scenes or simple scenes containing additional reference to place. However, literal translation may as well mirror the translatorʼs dialect, which shows alternative expressions of localization.Tęsiant kognityvinės lingvistikos išplėtotus erdvės tyrimus, šiame straipsnyje analizuojama lokalizacijos raiška naujai atrastoje lietuviškojoje Georgo Wenkerio medžiagoje. Ją sudaro 59 lietuviškai užpildyti lapai, 1879–1890 m. gauti iš tuometei Vokietijai priklausiusios Mažosios Lietuvos kaimų. Kiekviename sakinių lape yra 40 vokiečių aukštaičių tarme užrašytų sakinių ir jų vertimai į lietuvių kalbą. Kadangi beveik pusėje Wenkerio sugalvotų vokiečių kalbos sakinių esama lokalizacijos erdvėje įvardijimų, tyrimui atrinkti tie, kuriuose realizuoti skirtingo sudėtingumo erdviniai santykiai. Todėl tyrimo objektas yra 14 vokiškų sakinių vertimai į lietuvių kalbą (iš viso – 557 sakiniai). Straipsnio tikslas yra ištirti, kokiomis raiškos priemonėmis vokiškuosiuose sakiniuose įvardyti erdvės santykiai reprezentuojami lietuviškuosiuose sakinių vertimuose, aptarti jų pasirinkimo motyvus ir autentiškumo problemą. Lietuviškuosiuose sakiniuose realizuoti erdviniai santykiai analizuojami, remiantis kognityvinės semantikos konceptualizacijos ir reikšmės interpretavimo teorijomis. Nustatant vietos raiškos priemonių autentiškumą, taikomas gretinamasis metodas.Kiekviename vokiškajame sakinyje įvardytą erdvinę sceną pavaizdavus apibendrintoje vaizdinėje schemoje, aptariami erdvės santykių konceptualizavimo modeliai ir jiems realizuoti pasirinktos lietuvių kalbos raiškos priemonės. Nustačius lokalizacijos raiškos priemonių inventorių, aptariama jų pasirinkimo motyvacija, įvertinamas lietuviškųjų sakinių vietos raiškos priemonių autentiškumas.Lietuviškosios medžiagos analizė parodė, jog joje projektuotų erdvinių scenų dalyvių būsena arba judėjimas dažniausiai įvardijamas prielinksninėmis konstrukcijomis. Sekant vokiškuoju originalu, šios lokalizacijos nuorodos gali būti papildytos patikslinančiais prieveiksmiais. Tiek vietai, tiek krypčiai įvardyti inesyvo ir iliatyvo linksniai vartojami retai.Išanalizavus medžiagą galima kelti prielaidą, jog lietuvių kalba užrašytų vertimo variantų gausa ir raiškos priemonių inventoriaus pasirinkimas priklauso nuo vokiškuose sakiniuose projektuotų erdvinių scenų sudėtingumo. Paprastos, arba elementariosios erdvinės scenos, kurių dalyviai yra vienas ar daugiau trajektorių, esančių arba judančių į vieną orientyrą, išverstos be variantų, pasirenkant lietuvių kalbai prototipines raiškos priemones. Šių erdvinių scenų realizacijos, vokiškuose sakiniuose papildytos patikslinančiomis vietos nuorodomis, dažniausiai verstos pažodžiui. Daugiausiai vertimo variantų turi sudėtingosios erdvinės scenos. Jas įvardijančios lokalizacijos raiškos priemonės arba pažodžiui verstos iš vokiečių kalbos, arba, nutolstant nuo originalo, pasirinktas kūrybiškas vertimas. Taigi lietuviškųjų Wenkrio sakinių analizė atskleidžia juose vartotų vietos raiškos priemonių autentiškumo ir erdvinės scenos sudėtingumo ryšį. Lietuvių kalbai prototipinės lokalizacijos raiškos priemonės vertusiųjų asmenų buvo pasirinktos elementariosioms erdvinėms scenoms įvardyti. Pažodinis vertimas būdingas sudėtingosioms ir elementariosioms erdvinėms scenoms su papildomomis lokalizacijos nuorodomis. Neatmestina prielaida, jog toks vertimas pažodiniu laikytinas tik sąlyginai, nes jo priežastis gali būti ir vertusiojo asmens mokėta tarmė bei joje vartotos neprototipinės lokalizacijos raiškos priemonės
Noun Phrases as expressions of evidentiality: an analysis of four English abstract nouns and their Spanish equivalents
Get PDFThis paper presents an analysis of the expression of evidentiality with the English nouns evidence, indication, proof and sign and their Spanish equivalents evidencia, indicación, prueba and señal. The nouns are described as shell nouns having the properties of encapsulating, signalling and labelling. The delimitation of their evidential and non-evidential uses is determined by three factors: existence of a qualified proposition (Belief), non-occurrence within an irrealis context and constant value of the evidential qualification when the Belief refers to a plurality of events. The difficulties posed by the delimitation illustrate the problems involved in determining the scope of evidentiality when expressed by lexical devices belonging to the content of a proposition. A quantitative analysis was carried out on 400 occurrences of the nouns, extracted from two comparable corpora. The results reveal that all the nouns except two expressed evidentiality in most cases, that the linguistic context in which they appear shows great variation in terms of syntax and information structure, and that the labelling function is prominent. The results also uncover idiosyncratic evidential expressions with some of the nouns