Mažmožis

ACTA LINGUISTICA LITHUANICA XLVIII (2003), 177-184 The adjectives cruel, ruthless in the Žemaičių dialect attracted the attention of Steven Young, a Baltist at the University of Baltimore, in his very interesting article „Lithuanian žiaurūs: žiudrus“ (Acta Linguistica Lithuanica 47, 109-115). The sentences taken from DONZ 453, 458 p. seem to require some remarks like these: pakulines laba: 2odros a.udeklas; vi.kšręs Z0dros | pjd.usta ližūvę givuol'ūn. The second sentence of Zodra is transposable not žudrūs, but žiudrūs: caterpillar žiudrūs cuts its tongue into a beast (Dat. sing.; noun givuolis | g'ivūolis; here in the old traditional South Samogitian Varniškiai dialect the non-etymological n is added to the dat. sing. ending -w > -uo). It is not žudrus, but probably my obvious proofreading error will have misled the author, although the nest —žuudrus, i.e. all sentences defined by the word Ziudrus (the 6-year (1969-1975) compilation of the text was very complicated with prohibitions, complaints, etc.). In living speech, this adjective is now forgotten, usually used by old villagers; its roots are žiaud-, žiud-, therefore it is only žiudrūs, and scholars from distant countries who do not have that dialectal dictionary may sometimes hesitate and start quoting the non-existent word *žudrus. Vytautas Vitkauskas Received 2003 05 05 Lithuanian Language Institute P. Vileišio g. 5, 2055 Vilnius, Lithuania ABOUT THE NULL CONJUNCT This text is primarily intended to discuss such sentences as: My brother is disabled; A persistent cough is a symptom of a serious illness, etc. In contemporary Lithuanian grammar (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1994) they are considered noun sentences, corresponding to the trinomial model, because Oras gražus is considered to have a zero conjunction (p. 612). Before embarking on a polemic on this narrow issue, I will start by mentioning two statements without which the polemic is meaningless and to which I will try to adhere strictly. First statement: Nothing has any signs. In a joke I say it differently: Nobody's hair grows. It seems that the formulation of the statement belongs to Immanuel Kant, but I do not remember it well, and since I do not support the truth of the statements by authority, it is enough for me that I consider jj to be right. Logic does not operate directly by word, but in its theory of classes it accepts a null, or empty, class (I note that it is called null by the sign used to mark it, and empty — by the