Gramatinių formų vartojimas lietuvių kalbos moksliniame stiliuje

ACTA LINGUISTICA LITHUANICA XLVI (2002), 173–183 The Use of Grammatical Forms in the Lithuanian Scientific Style VIDA ŽILINSKIENĖ Lietuvos teisės universitetas, Vilnius The article presents frequency data for the basic parts of speech (substantives, adjectives, verbs) and their inflectional forms used in Lithuanian scientific writing. It is based on the Frequency Dictionary of Modern Written Lithuanian (Grumadienė & Žilinskienė 1997) and, more specifically, on its electronic version providing data for the language of science (Grumadienė & Žilinskienė 1996). Furthermore, the frequency of the parts of speech in the language of scientific writings is compared with their frequency in the language varieties used in business and in publicistic writing. At a time when Lithuanian is increasingly encountered in the information society, the study of particular styles, and even of texts belonging to specific thematic groups within a single style, at various levels of language is becoming ever more relevant. This applies first and foremost to statistical studies of individual levels of language (lexicon, morphology, word formation). Having described the morphological structure of Lithuanian journalistic and administrative styles and demonstrated the differences and similarities in the use of parts of speech and their principal grammatical forms (see Žilinskienė 2002: 106–116), it is important to establish how these forms are used in the scientific style as well. If it were found that the use of certain grammatical forms is stable across texts of various styles, while that of others differs markedly, it would become clear what aspects deserve the most attention in addressing automatic recognition, translation, and other related issues. As in the study of the morphological structure of journalistic and administrative styles, the present study also used the computerized version of the scientific-style corpus for the “Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary Written Lithuanian” (Grumadienė, Žilinskienė 1997) (Grumadienė, Žilinskienė 1996). The texts used to calculate the frequency dictionary for this style were collected from scholarly publications (monographs, articles, abstracts, and academic journals) published in Lithuania between 1990 and 1995, or from works approved by scientific institutions (dissertations, doctoral dissertation abstracts, reports, and patents). A few texts had to be taken from a somewhat earlier period, since some fields of science publish very few works in Lithuanian1; for example, no scientific articles or conference papers in Lithuanian from the period in question were available in some fields of chemistry and biology 1A strict policy was followed: samples (continuous text segments containing 1,000 word tokens) for the frequency dictionary would be collected only from strictly scholarly publications, and not from textbooks, popular science publications, and the like. 174 | V I D A Ž I L I N S K I E N Ė fields2, while in theology it was not possible to find a single monograph in Lithuanian, so only articles had to be used. The scientific style was represented by eight thematic groups: 1) agricultural sciences (agronomy, forestry, veterinary science, zootechnics); 2) natural sciences (astronomy, biology, chemistry, geography, geology and mineralogy, physics); 3) humanities (architecture, art history, ethnology, philosophy, folklore studies, history, linguistics, literary studies, musicology, theatre studies); 4) mathematical sciences (mathematics, logic, statistics, computer science, systems science); 5) medical sciences (medicine, pharmacy, dentistry); 6) social sciences (education, economics, political science, psychology, sociology, law, management, library science and book studies); 7) engineering sciences (agricultural and environmental engineering, chemical technology, electronics and electrical engineering, energy and thermal engineering, control and information technology, mechanics, materials science, metrology and measurement, transport technology, construction); 8) theological sciences (fundamental theology, dogmatic theology, moral theology, scriptural studies (Holy Scripture), patrology (the traditions of the early Church), Church history, pastoral theology, canon law). These thematic groups were selected with reference to the classification of fields and branches of science approved by Resolution No. 739 of the Government of the Republic of Lithuania on October 7, 1992. From publications in the listed fields and branches of science (taking into account that there were very many publications in certain fields, such as the humanities and engineering, and very few in others), 300 samples were selected at random—that is, segments of continuous text containing 1,000 word tokens3—and frequency lists were compiled for each sample, then for each thematic group, and from these, the frequency dictionary of the scientific style. In calculating the frequencies of words (lexemes), the frequencies of their grammatical forms were also counted; these are what we will discuss. First, let us examine the use of parts of speech in scientific texts (see Table 1). TABLE 1. USE OF PARTS OF SPEECH IN THE SCIENTIFIC STYLE Part of speech Number of word tokens Word tokens (%) Noun 121 696 43,73 Verb 50 958 18,31 Adjective 32 806 11,79 2 Previously, many scholars in certain fields published their work only in Russian, whereas now some of them are rushing to write only in English. This gives rise to a twofold problem: first, scholarly texts are not written, or are hardly written at all, in Lithuanian, and thus the terminology of the respective field is neither developed nor created; second, it would be interesting to know the level of English in which those texts are written. 3 A coherent text is precisely what shows the actual use of parts of speech and their grammatical forms. GRAMATINIŲ FORMŲ VARTOJIMAS MOKSLINIAME STILIUJE | 175 Part of speech Number of word occurrences Word occurrences (%) Conjunction 21 247 7.63 Pronoun 18 899 6.79 Preposition 12 073 4.34 Adverb 11 753 4.22 Particle 5 963 2.14 Numeral4 2 863 1.03 Interjection 48 0.02 Onomatopoeia 5 0.002 As we can see from these data, nouns are used most frequently in the scientific style; that is, almost half (43.73%) of the words in a scientific text are nouns. A substantial further portion of scientific texts (30.10%) consists of words belonging to the two other parts of speech—verbs and adjectives. Thus, words from just three parts of speech make up almost three quarters (73.83%) of the texts examined. Using the computerized frequency dictionaries of the scientific, technical, and publicistic styles (Žilinskienė 2002: 106–116), compiled according to the same methodology (for more on this, see Žilinskienė 1998: 219–227) from texts published in 1993–1995, let us compare the use of parts of speech in texts of these styles, since comparison can best reveal the true situation (see Table 2). The data in this table show that: 1) nouns clearly predominate in the texts of all three styles; that is, noun-heavy language is characteristic of all the styles compared, although publicistic texts contain fewer nouns than texts in the other two styles; 2) the lexical diversity of all these styles is determined above all by two parts of speech—the noun and the verb; function words and pronouns (from a statistical perspective, pronouns always behave like function words), of which only a few dozen distinct words (not word occurrences) were found in texts of each of the styles, that is, words which make up a very small part of the vocabulary, account for approximately one quarter to one fifth of the texts (20.90% in the scientific style, 22.59% in the technical style, and 26.13% in the publicistic style); 3) in the texts of all styles, the second most frequently used part of speech is the verb 4 As is customary in compiling frequency dictionaries, only numerals written out in words are recorded here; numerals written with Arabic or Roman digits were included only in the description of the statistical structure. 176 | VIDA ŽILINSKIENĖ …; in the styles being compared, its use differs little; 4) the use of adjectives differs: they are most frequent in scholarly5 texts, and markedly less frequent in journalistic and administrative styles; 5) all nominal parts of speech account for 63.34%, 62.34%, and 56.54% in scholarly, administrative, and journalistic texts, respectively; 6) overall, in terms of the use of all parts of speech, scholarly texts are closer to administrative texts. TABLE 2. USE OF PARTS OF SPEECH IN SCHOLARLY, ADMINISTRATIVE, AND JOURNALISTIC STYLES Part of speech Scholarly style Administrative style Journalistic style Word-token count Word use (%) Word-token count Word use (%) Word-token count Word use (%) Noun 121 696 43.73 126 520 45.27 109 724 38.54 Verb 50 958 18.31 54 491 19.50 59 814 21.01 Adjective 32 806 11.79 22 462 8.04 20 175 7.09 Conjunction 21 247 7.63 23 706 8.48 22 973 8.07 Pronoun 18 899 6.79 22 438 8.03 27 346 9.61 Preposition 12 073 4.34 12 354 4.42 14 272 5.01 Adverb 11 753 4.22 9 817 3.51 16 541 5.81 Particle 5 963 2.14 4 629 1.66 9 806 3.44 Numeral 2 863 1.03 2 778 1.00 3 695 1.30 Interjection 48 0.02 299 0.11 328 0.12 Ideophone 5 0.002 11 0.005 13 0.005 5 Kaip matome, šie rezultatai atitinka A. Bitinienės (žr. Bitinienė 1995: 11–19) padarytą išvadą, kad moksliniame stiliuje teksto informatyvumą, be daiktavardžio, didina ir būdvardis, t. y. abi šios kalbos dalys padeda perteikti faktinę informaciją. GRAMATINIŲ FORMŲ VARTOJIMAS MOKSLINIAME STILIUJE | 177 Let us examine the use of the cases of the most frequent part of speech—the noun—as presented in Table 3. TABLE 3. USE OF NOUN CASES IN SCHOLARLY STYLE Singular Plural Noun case Word-token count Word use (%) Word-token count Word use (%) Genitive 37 703 46,47 18 546 45,85 Nominative 18 391 22,67 9 355 23,13 Accusative 10 763 13,27 5 828 14,41 Locative 5 534 6,82 2 068 5,11 Instrumental 5 488 6,766 2 939 7,27 Dative 3 234 3,999 1 685 4,17 Vocative 19 0,022 29 0,07 The data in Table 3 show that, in scholarly texts, the use of the genitive stands out very clearly among the noun cases—almost half of all noun case forms are genitives. The particularly high frequency of genitive forms is mainly associated with the fact that genitives most often function as relative adjectives in texts. This is evident from the fact that the genitive frequency of certain nouns (some of which are used very frequently, e.g., kultūra, duomenys, lietuviai, mokslas, veikla, šalis, energija, etc.) exceeds the frequency of the other cases of the same noun. Two other cases also have higher frequencies—the nominative and accusative—although, as the table shows, the nominative is almost twice as frequent as the accusative. Thus, in scholarly texts, the three most frequent cases account for over 80% of all noun case forms. The three less frequently used cases (except the vocative) form a more even group. In addition, 113 instances of indeclinable nouns were found in the scholarly texts examined. Comparing the absolute frequencies of singular and plural cases (Table 3), we see that each individual singular case is approximately twice as frequent as its corresponding plural case. The overall ratio of singular and plural noun forms is as follows: singular—81,132 (66.73%), plural—40,450 (33.26%), dual—1 (0.001%). 178 | VIDA ŽILINSKIENĖ Thus, in scholarly-style texts, singular noun forms are used twice as often as plural forms. This usage is associated, first, with the fact that the singular is the unmarked member of the opposition and, second, with the tendency to use many nouns in the singular, even though many nouns occur in both singular and plural forms. This is especially true of nouns denoting materials, processes, or abstract concepts, whose plural forms often acquire a specific meaning (e.g., elementas, medžiaga, vanduo, kultūra, veikla, matavimas, santykis, valdymas, sluoksnis, masė, gamyba, visuomenė, etc.). In texts of the style under examination, masculine nouns are used much more often than feminine nouns: masculine—73,296 (60.28%), feminine—48,287 (39.72%). This usage is, of course, also related to the fact that the masculine is the unmarked member of the opposition. As we saw from the data in Table 1, the second most frequent part of speech in scholarly-style texts is the verb. The most frequent verbs in scholarly style are: būti, galėti, turėti, vadinti, sudaryti, naudoti, nustatyti, pateikti, skirti, nebūti, priklausyti, atlikti, gauti, reikėti. These dozen or so verbs alone give us an idea of what scholarly-style texts mainly discuss. The proportions of individual verb forms are presented in Table 4. TABLE 4. USE OF VERB FORMS IN SCHOLARLY STYLE Verb form | Number of occurrences of word forms | Form occurrences (%) Finite forms | 20,483 | 41.20 Participles | 19,180 | 37.64 Infinitive | 7,266 | 14.26 Gerundive participles | 3,365 | 6.60 Half-participles | 659 | 1.29 Adverbial participles in -tinai/-tinai | 5 | 0.01 From this table, we can see that in scholarly texts conjugated forms are used most frequently, with participles only slightly less common. The fairly frequent use of participles in the scholarly style apparently indicates that compound GRAMATINIŲ FORMŲ VARTOJIMAS MOKSLINIAME STILIUJE | 179 tenses are used extensively in these texts, e.g.: Some complexes, designed according to the principles of Baroque architecture, were built on the sites of buildings or blocks destroyed during the war. To determine the range of measurement values, the ratios of the zones’ longitudinal resistances were varied. As might be expected, among conjugated forms the indicative mood clearly predominates: indicative – 19,328 (94.36%), conditional – 1,015 (4.96%), imperative – 140 (0.68%). From studies of the use of grammatical forms in other Lithuanian styles, we can expect that different styles are characterized by particular uses of verb tenses (see Žilinskienė 2002: 106–116). The distribution of indicative tenses in scholarly-style texts is presented in Table 5. TABLE 5. USE OF VERB TENSES IN THE SCHOLARLY STYLE Verb tense | Number of word-form occurrences | Form occurrences (%) Present | 12,901 | 66.75 Simple past | 5,475 | 28.33 Future | 780 | 4.04 Frequentative past | 172 | 0.89 As this table shows, present-tense forms are used most often in scholarly texts; that is, they occur more than twice as frequently as forms of the other main tense—the simple past. This is apparently related to the fact that scholarly style most often records phenomena of reality that exist continuously, along with their relationships and regularities, and describes production processes or experiments, etc. For example: The bog and hollow communities with loose, fragile moss cover suffer most from trampling. East of the palace, a parterre stretches out, with the office wing adjoining it to the north, a granary to the south, and a stable beside the granary. If an official who is required to do so does not prevent the crime... Similar results—that the present tense is much more frequent than the simple past in scholarly texts—were reported by A. Bitinienė, who examined 38,500 words (see Bitinienė 1995: 11–19). Latvian linguists likewise found that the present tense accounted for as much as 93.1 percent of occurrences in scholarly and technical texts examined in 1966 (292,000 word occurrences) (see Jakubaite et al. 1968: 122). The use of person forms in the indicative tenses is presented in Table 6, which shows a clear predominance of the third person, indicating its special position in the person system. Therefore, the opinion of some linguists (Žulys 1974: 83– 180 | VIDA ŽILINSKIENĖ 92), that this form should not be regarded as a personal form; moreover, the higher frequency of the first-person plural than of the other persons is striking. This is probably related to the fact that in scholarly texts even a single author, when describing an experiment, commenting on the research results obtained, or drawing conclusions, often uses the plural, e.g.: we connect, we create, we observe, we call, we investigated, we established. TABLE 6. USE OF VERB PERSON FORMS OF THE INDICATIVE MOOD IN SCHOLARLY STYLE Verb person Present tense Simple past tense Future tense Frequentative past tense Number of word occurrences Word occurrence (%) Number of word occurrences Word occurrence (%) Number of word occurrences Word occurrence (%) Number of word occurrences Word occurrence (%) 1st person singular 45 0.35 27 0.49 7 0.89 – – 2nd person singular 19 0.15 4 0.07 8 1.03 – – 1st person plural 522 4.05 190 3.47 275 35.26 7 4.07 2nd person plural 2 0.02 2 0.04 3 0.38 – – 3rd person 12 313 95.44 5 252 95.93 485 62.44 165 95.93 As we saw from the data in Table 4, in addition to finite forms, participles are also widely used in scholarly style. Their distribution by voice is as follows: active-voice participles – 4,539 (23.67%), passive-voice participles – 14,641 (76.33%). Thus, it is clearly evident that passive-voice participles are used three times more often than active-voice participles in scholarly texts. The use of tenses in participles of both voices shows a trend similar to that for tenses in finite forms (see Table 7), i.e., present-tense forms are used more often than past-tense forms, although the difference here is less pronounced. GRAMATINIŲ FORMŲ VARTOJIMAS MOKSLINIAME STILIUJE | 181 TABLE 7. USE OF PARTICIPLE TENSES IN SCHOLARLY STYLE Participle tense Active voice Number of word occurrences Word occurrence (%) Passive voice Number of word occurrences Word occurrence (%)Present 2 608 57.46 8 275 56.52; Simple past 1 923 42.37; Frequentative past 3 0.07; Past 6 060 41.39; Future 5 0.11 30 0.20; Necessity participle 276 1.89 Let us examine another important part of speech—the adjective. The following adjectives are most commonly used in scholarly-style texts: large, varied, main, new, important, general, small, social, separate, different, true, characteristic, high, equal, scholarly, political, latter, economic, good, special. Let us discuss the frequency of the grammatical categories of the adjective. The use of adjective cases is presented in Table 8. TABLE 8. USE OF ADJECTIVE CASES IN SCHOLARLY STYLE Adjective case Singular Number of word occurrences Word occurrence (%) Plural Number of word occurrences Word occurrence (%)Nominative 6 406 34.23 4 136 30.52; Genitive 6 066 32.41 4 962 36.62; Accusative 2 992 15.99 2 102 15.51 182 | VIDA ŽILINSKIENĖ Singular Plural Adjective case Number of word occurrences Word use (%) Number of word occurrences Word use (%)Instrumental 1 667 8.91 1 196 8.83Locative 903 4.82 657 4.85Dative 672 3.59 498 3.68Vocative 10 0.05 – – The table shows that, as in the case of nouns, adjective cases can be divided into frequently used (nominative, genitive, accusative—which together account for over 80% of all adjective cases) and infrequently used (instrumental, locative, dative) groups. However, the adjective genitive is not as frequent as the noun genitive, which occurs in texts in place of a relative adjective. In addition, the use of the corresponding singular and plural cases of adjectives does not differ as much as that of nouns (cf. Table 3). The overall ratio of singular and plural adjective forms is as follows: singular—18,716 (58.00%), plural—13,551 (42.00%). As expected, masculine adjectives are used more often than feminine adjectives in texts of the style under study: masculine—18,200 (55.48%), feminine—14,067 (42.88%), gender-neutral form—539 (1.64%). Since in Lithuanian, pronominal forms of adjectives and other parts of speech used adjectivally are used mainly in terms to express the essential (marked) property of a term expressed by a noun, one might expect that pronominal forms would be more frequent in academic-style texts. Indeed, they were found in the texts: 7.01% of all adjectives, 12.47% of present, 2.61% of past, and 27.59% of future6passive voice participles. Thus, the research conducted reveals which grammatical forms of the main parts of speech are most characteristic of Lithuanian academic texts, that is, which grammatical forms specialists working in automatic recognition and machine translation will need to focus on first. 6 These are the various cases of the participle’s future (see Table 7). GRAMATINIŲ FORMŲ VARTOJIMAS MOKSLINIAME STILIUJE | 183 CONCLUSIONS 1. In Lithuanian academic-style texts, the most frequently used part of speech is the noun, which accounts for almost half (43.73%) of the words in the text; the other two main parts of speech—verbs and adjectives—account for 30.10% of the text. 2. In academic-style texts, noun cases (except the vocative), according to frequency of use, fall into a primary group (genitive, nominative, accusative) and a peripheral group (locative, instrumental, and dative). The genitive case is particularly frequent: in texts of this style, almost half of all case forms are genitive. 3. In academic style, finite verb forms are used most frequently (41.20%), with participles somewhat less frequent (37.64%). 3.1. In academic-style texts, present-tense finite verb forms and participles are used more often than past-tense forms or participles (this is particularly characteristic of finite forms). 3.2. In this style, the third person clearly predominates among verb person forms; among the other infrequently used person forms, the first-person plural stands out for its higher frequency. 4. In academic style, adjective cases, like noun cases, also fall into frequently and infrequently used groups, but the adjective genitive is not as frequent as the noun genitive. 5. In academic-style texts, singular nouns and adjectives and the masculine gender predominate as the unmarked members of oppositions. 6. In terms of parts-of-speech usage, academic texts are closer to professional texts. LITERATŪRA BITINIENĖ, A. 1995: Mokslinio stiliaus morfologinės ypatybės. Terminologija 2, 11–19. GRUMADIENĖ, L., ŽILINSKIENĖ, V. 1996: Dažninis dabartinės rašomosios lietuvių kalbos žodynas: mokslinis stilius (kompiuterinis variantas). GRUMADIENĖ, L., ŽILINSKIENĖ, V. 1997: Dažninis dabartinės rašomosios lietuvių kalbos žodynas: mažėjančio dažnio tvarka, Vilnius: Mokslo aidai. JAKUBAITĖ, T., e.a. 1968: Latviešu valodas biežuma vārdnīca. I- sēj., 2 daļa, Rīga: Zinātne. ŽILINSKIENĖ, V. 1998: Dažninis dabartinės rašomosios lietuvių kalbos žodynas: pirmieji tyrimo rezultatai. Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai 39, 219–227. ŽILINSKIENĖ, V. 2002: Lietuvių kalbos morfologijos formos dalykinio ir publicistinio stilių duomenimis. Lituanistica 1 (49), 106–116. ŽULYS, V. 1974: Trečiojo asmens nėra. Kalbotyra 25 (1), 83–92. Vida Žilinskienė Lietuvos teisės universitetas Ateities g. 20, 2057 Vilnius, Lietuva [email protected] Gauta 2002 04 09