Ar gali ką nors reikšti tuščia vieta?

136 | PASTABOS b. in some places pronounced hard before the reduced diphthong -ai: rai.kšt’e ‘raikštė’ Drsk, RTN, krū.šis ‘kriaušius’ KB, VRN, krái.vas ‘kreivas’ Drsk, etc.; c. in the sequence *rj > *rᵢ > r: brau.na ‘briauna’ Užv, KrS, Krtv, krau.š’is (standard-language kriaušis) KrŠ, RDN, TL, EIG, krúokt’e ‘verkti’ (standard-language kriokti) TL, RDN, VARN, ŠV, RT, rã.uš’es ‘riausės’ ŠV, GRDM, etc. Borrowings conform to these: krū’ks (Highland krūkas), šrūps (North Samogitian and Highland š’r’ūps | š’r’ūbas), krau.č’ūs ‘kriaučius, tailor’, krūk’is ‘krūkis, crutch’ KrŠ, KRTV, ŠAUK, krū.k’is ‘ditto’ RDN, TRŠ, TL, etc. The entire area in Samogitia where *rjau, *rja, *rjo, *rju, *rjū developed into rau, ro, ru, rų is known; there is no hardening of r before front vowels there (cf. aut., Lietuvių kalbos tarmių morfoneminiai reiškiniai, Vilnius, 2001, 158–161). The compilers of the phonetics volume of LKA₁₁ had not planned a study of this phenomenon; the transcription of dialect data had not been standardized, and so many uncertainties had already been raised earlier, yet confusion persists even now. For example, the word sukrokė in LKŽₓᵢₓ 626 (dial. sùkruok’i KrŠ) is corrected to sukriȯkė (R. Mikulskas, Acta Linguistica Lithuanica 48, 87), while krū’kas KLVr is classified under kriūko¹, although there, too, there can be no hardening of r (unless it were some kind of anomaly). Thus, the problem of *rj + a, ȧ; u, u̇ is still associated with the hardening and softening of r, although this concerns the loss of old *i and the analogy that emerged later (when only rau, ro, ru, rų or r’au, r’o, r’u, r’ų would be generalized in dialects). In any case, the structure and system of the dialects need to be examined closely. Vytautas Vitkauskas Lithuanian Language Institute P. Vileišio g. 5, 10308 Vilnius, Lithuania Received 2004 04 07 CAN AN EMPTY SPACE MEAN ANYTHING? In Professor Vladas Žulys’s article “On the Alleged Zero Copula” (Acta Linguistica Lithuanica 48, 177–184), he polemicizes with Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos gramatika (Vilnius, 1994), in which sentences such as Oras gražus are considered to have a zero copula. The author of the article believes that the term zero copula (and, more generally, zero forms) is flawed. That opinion is worthy of respect. I would only like to say a few things about the arguments used to support it. The first of these is the statement attributed to Immanuel Kant: Nothing has properties. The author adds: Nothing grows hair. If a class is empty, it has not a single member, and only members can have properties. Therefore, the statement Although there is no copula (nothing), it nevertheless has the meaning of the indicative present tense (a property) is supposedly logically contradictory (p. 178). Accepting the rules of the game proposed by the article’s author—that appeals to authorities be left to theology—I will not mention any of the many works written about zero forms. The cited logical propositions are correct, but they do not at all contradict the conception of zero presented in the Grammar. A linguistic zero is not some nonexistent empirical object or entity equivalent to nothing. The term denotes the absence of a formal marker of a member of a grammatical paradigm, which, due to the rela- 1 For Mikulskas’s convenience, variants krūko, kruko, kriūko have been left unexplained, as have the alternations v̇ąšas (even the impossible ąšas), ō’nčas, ūnčas, v̇ȯ.ršȯs, lȯ’ršas (see R. Mikulskas, Acta Linguistica Lithuanica 46, 85). PASTABOS | 137 …of it with other members of the paradigm is significant and provides a certain function. The Grammar discussed here puts it this way: “The absence of a copula indicates the meaning of the present tense of the indicative; such a zero copula, that is, one whose absence is grammatically significant, is equivalent to the present-tense form of the verb būti ‘to be’; cf.: Oras gražus / Oras yra gražus” (p. 612). Thus, the zero form is viewed as a methodological concept that helps specify when the absence of a particular marker has a defined grammatical function. Similarly, in Russian grammar, the noun stol is considered to have a zero ending, since the absence of a formal ending marker here indicates the meaning of the masculine singular nominative, which becomes apparent through its relation to other members of the declensional paradigm. In such circumstances, the question “Does a zero copula exist?” does not seem meaningful at all; it would be more meaningful to ask: “Is the term zero copula useful for grammatical description, or does it help characterize the function of a syntactic unit in relation to other units?” How the concept of the zero copula can be applied to describing sentence structure and its development can already be seen in the example discussed in the article, Mano brolis neįgalus (pp. 180–181). It is claimed that this is a tenseless sentence, abstracted from time and place. That particular sentence can in fact be understood in two ways: as a tenseless nominal sentence and as a member of the paradigm of sentences with a copula, Brolis yra / buvo / būdavo / bus neįgalus, used with the meaning of the present tense. Thus, not all sentences without a copula are alike. The difference would be even more striking if we took, for example, the sentence cited by Jablonskis, Ąžuolas kaitrus medis. The present-tense meaning here would seem quite forced, and the paradigm Ąžuolas buvo / būdavo / bus kaitrus medis artificial. In its structure, this sentence represents an old Indo-European type of nominal sentence, as do sentences such as Juoda duona ne badas, Genys margas, žmogaus gyvenimas dar margesnis and so on. From the earliest times, sentences of this type were commonly used to express general relations among things and phenomena, the so-called ‘eternal truths’. They were used even before sentences with a copula existed at all, when verbs with the roots es- and *bhu- had concrete meanings (existential and others). As those verbs became abstract markers of tense and mood—that is, copulas—sentences with a present-tense copula drew closer to the aforementioned nominal sentences, and many of the latter were reinterpreted (reanalyzed) as sentences in which the absence of a copula (i.e. a zero copula) denotes the present tense of the indicative. Similar processes occurred in other related languages, but led to very different outcomes. For example, in Russian, sentences with an overt present-tense copula disappeared, and almost all nominal sentences became sentences with a zero copula. In German and English, on the other hand, a copula became obligatory in all cases of what is known as a compound nominal predicate. Lithuanian has preserved an older state in this respect, and some sentences without an overt verb may still be regarded as relics of nominal sentences. Nevertheless, most of them (especially those with adjectives) already function in the standard language as members of paradigms of sentences with copulas, expressing the present tense of the indicative. Thus, it is sometimes not enough to say that a sentence has no copula, since that absence may be a feature either of the sentence type or of its grammatical tense meaning. Of course, if language researchers were to find better methodological tools in the future for characterizing the paradigmatic relations among such syntactic units, the term zero copula, like the term zero form, could be abandoned. It is regrettable that, in considering this issue, the polemical article in question relies first and foremost not on linguistic arguments but on general claims about language, supposedly scientific and binding on everyone. It categorically demands that the linguistic sign be regarded only as an empirical object, while the conventional conception of the linguistic sign as two-sided (bilateral) is declared to be contrary to common sense (p. 179). Yet separating the linguistic sign from its meaning is not so simple. It is claimed that the linguistic sign beržas is “an empirical, that is, uttered object” that “indicates another empirical object—a deciduous tree 138 | PASTABOS with white bark” (p. 179). What connects these empirical objects; what do they have in common? Probably no more than the cats of Michel Foucault, one of which has just spilled the milk, while the other is painted on silk. The relationship between the empirical objects mentioned by the author is possible only in the consciousness of speakers/listeners, where the meaning of the word—the image or concept of a birch—is the signified of the linguistic sign, its “other side.” The origins of the criticized concept of zero forms are also sought in the view of Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos gramatikos that grammatical structure is a system of relations among meaningful elements existing in human consciousness (p. 5). This is supposedly “substantive psychologism,” “hopelessly outdated and a view that can no longer be rescued by any argument,” and, if accepted, “ancient texts are in principle undecipherable” (p. 179). As though anyone denied the empirical nature of acoustic vibrations or written texts (including descriptions of grammatical systems)… But where, if not in human consciousness, do such things as the rules for forming sentences and word combinations, and the relations among their units—that is, what constitutes the basis of a language’s grammatical system—exist? Incidentally, it is remarked in one place that “what is in our heads is not the structure of language with its signs, but the ability to operate with it” (p. 179). This is an even greater mystery: how do those poor heads manage to operate with something that is not in them, something located somewhere in “objective reality”? We have not yet forgotten the amusing “reflection theory,” which required us to seek in that secret place a counterpart for every linguistic phenomenon—but perhaps it is no longer necessary for everyone to profess it? I fully agree that “language can be studied without resolving the ontological question” (p. 180). I would only add that no doctrine of general linguistics or epistemology should be imposed on language researchers as supposedly modern, most advanced, and scientific. Vytautas Ambrazas Institute of the Lithuanian Language P. Vileišio g. 5, 10308 Vilnius, Lithuania Received 2004 05 20