Vytautas Sirtautas, Regina Petkevičienė, Česys Grenda. „Rinktiniai kalbotyros straipsniai“

RECENZIJOS | 201 LITERATŪRA CHRISTIANI, L. 1934: The chronology of popes, from origins to Pius XI. You are Petrus. Encyclopédie populaire sur la papautė, Paris: Librairie Bloud et Gay, 491-529. KupziNnowskl, Cz. 1977: Index to „Daukšos Postilė“ 2, Poznan: Scientific Publishing House of the Adam Mickiewicz University. LEBEDYS, J. 1955: Simonas Stanevičius, Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla. MACIONAS, V. 1997: Lithuanianist movement at the beginning of the 19th century, Vilnius (publisher not specified). PALIONIS, J. 1967: Lithuanian literary language in the 16th-17th centuries, Vilnius: Mintis. SuBaAČIius, G. 1998: Ideas of the Žemaičių common language, Vilnius: Institute of Science and Encyclopedia Publishing. VYTAUTAS SIRTAUTAS, REGINA PETKEVIČIENĖ, ČESYS GRENDA, CHOSEN ARTICLE IN THE COLLECTION OF LITHUANIAN LANGUAGE [Šiauliai:] Šiaulių University Press, 2001, 288 p. In 2001, Vytautas Sirtautas, Professor Lietuvių kalbos institutas Antakalnio g. 6, 2055 Vilnius, Lietuva of the Department of Lithuanian Language at Šiauliai University, turned 80 years old, and associate professors Regina Petkevičiene and Česys Grenda — 70 years old, respectively. All three of them have been working at the same Northern Lithuania Higher School (previously Šiauliai Pedagogical Institute) for about 40 years or more and together with colleagues have prepared hundreds of teachers of Lithuanian language and literature, thousands of teachers of elementary school pedagogy and methodology and other specialties, written or compiled more than one textbook for students, textbooks for higher schools (V. Sirtautas and secondary schools), published a bunch of articles popularizing science, methodology and language, actively participate in scientific conferences. The authors themselves selected a handful of articles from their collections for the anniversary book and, as stated in the preface signed by the editorial board, some of the articles were corrected or clarified. The book was compiled by Prof. K. Župerka, Head of the Department of Lithuanian Language at the University, and the editors’ board included the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities doc. G. Kačiuškienė (chairperson) and the vice-rector of the university doc. J. Emphasis. Each linguistic part of the book begins with a beautiful mature photo and a warmly presented biography. Prof. V. Sirtautas is presented to readers by Prof. K. Župerka, doc. R. Petkevičienę —doc. G. Kačiuškienė, and doc. Č. Grendas, who was for many years head of the Lithuanian Language Department of the Šiauliai Pedagogical Institute, —doc. J. Schwab. After that, the articles of each author published at various times in the collections of language science works are listed. The sections end with bibliographies of linguistic works (additions to the bibliographic index published in 1999 as a separate book by Prof. V. Sirtautas and works from 1998-2000). The bibliographies were compiled by R. Jakutienė, Head of the Bibliography Department of the Scientific Šiauliai University Library. This is the structure of the book. 202 | REVIEWS Below are the articles of linguists included in the book. The publication contains eleven articles and articles of Prof. V. Sirtautas of various themes and different nature. The first published publicistic article was the article “Language as poetry” published in the book Kokia tautos kalba (What is the language of the people) (Vilnius, 1990). The feelings and thoughts expressed in the article are embraced by two extreme sentences—the first (Listen as the sacred language whispers to you an everlasting song: “Do not forget me!” —p. 8) and the last (Let us be worthy of our language! —p. 11). In the article “Criteria for classification of official language parts” from the second volume of the book “Philology and Methodology” (1995) the foundations of the classification of language parts are briefly recalled, and another interesting case of their application is shown. As mentioned in the title of the article, it is mostly limited to the official parts of the language. Prepositions and conjunctions are not a major problem for the linguist, so they are discussed briefly. It is true that the statement that prepositions require a vowel, which has even been highlighted in the press and repeated several times, not rarely in the works of other linguists, can be doubted. Can they really, being servile words, claim the gender of the independent word? Rather, the adverb (and the independent word in general) needs a preposition to express certain meanings, and the preposition helps the adverb (and less often another word or gender —adverb, participle, semi-participle) to do so. In this way, the ambiguities mentioned in the article about the status of prepositions used with adverbs seem to be reduced (p. 14). However, most of the space in this article is devoted to the particle, as the most difficult to identify part of speech (p. 15). Particles are confused with adverbs (p. 15), it is difficult to distinguish them from conjunctions and even from emoticons (p. 16). Several examples are discussed (dar; vėl, vos; kaip, tartum) and referred to perhaps more to 3DŽ, as well as to Lithuanian grammar and other publications due to the occurring inconsistencies in the evaluation (and naming) of these words. In some places, the authors of these discrepancies are even scolded, for example, it is said that “It is inconvenient when the same language phenomena are treated differently in different works (even published by the same institution)” (p. 13). But when we are talking about things that are not clearly separated, when the separation is still taking place in the eyes of researchers and consumers (and the article admits that the “signs of particles are rather pale,” p. 19), the uneven perception and presentation of the same things should not be very surprising, at least not to the scientists. And it does not matter whether they work in one or in different institutions. After all, everybody understands that forced or even voluntary uniformity leads only to stagnation of thought and science itself (this does not mean that here mistakes, inaccuracies or unexplained inequalities are justified). As long as science is alive, there will be no lack of different understandings of the same things and such interpretations. Therefore, one must fully agree with the conclusion of this article, that “it would be worthwhile to investigate these things even more carefully, because there are also transitional cases”. In the last couple of decades V. Sirtautas has devoted himself more to the subjects of so-called text linguistics. Together with his colleagues he wrote the first Lithuanian textbook of this kind for secondary schools, Text Secrets (Vilnius, 1995). In the selected articles of linguistics this direction of the professor- ’s interests is also best presented — four announcements from 1982 and 1997-1998 („Text syntax and analysis of a continuous sentence“, „General questions of text theory“, „From text theory“ and „Location and text“) are included. They touched on a number of subjects of text linguistics theory, not one briefly, but some (e.g. location) and more broadly explained, some special terms. These terms, even very rare, especially borrowed, are used quite a lot in these articles. Some of them, used in non-Lithuanian works of some foreign linguists and duplicating usual other terms, Lithuanian linguists probably do not even know. REVIEWS | 203 not required. It is true that V. Sirtautas says that he deliberately uses several terms, in his opinion, “it will help reading literature in other languages, and it is not clear which of them will become established” (p. 21). It may sometimes help someone reading in a foreign language (if it comes to his mind to look for information not in the dictionaries or other publications of that language, but in an article written in Lithuanian), but the Lithuanian text does not become clearer with such use. Instead of picking up a couple or a few different terms (even from ignorance, which will take effect), it would be more important to create a coherent system of terms based on the researcher's own understanding. In the article „Šitas medis vadinasi ąžuolas“ (from the 1993 issue of the Mother Language Journal) the author responds to the correction of the construction vadinasi tiesioginiai sakiniai (= are called direct sentences) inserted in a review of a school textbook and argumentatively defends the recursive verb and noun of such kind of statements. The direction of the changes in the meanings of lexical words (the whole — part, the general concept — partial concept, the object — characteristic, etc.) is examined in the article “Meanings of words and their changes in Baltic languages” (published in the publication “Relics of Western Baltic languages and culture”, Klaipėda, 2000, volume 3). This is a broad and complex subject of science, one could say, only moved, presented, in the words of the author himself, only the craft of changing meanings (p. 75). That's a good start. It is very important not to discard such researches, but to further deepen and develop them. The article “Body, soul and other concepts” (from the book “Body in Lithuanian culture”, Šiauliai, 2000) could also be considered exploratory. Here, among other things (for example, thoughts from the history of philosophy), a look is given at the meanings and use of the words meaning “body”, “spirit”, “soul” and “ghost” in different languages and their etymology. As is known, two of these words (spirit and soul) are intertwined in ordinary language, but as the terms of religion are clearly distinguished by black, this is also clearly seen from the interpretation of these words *DZ (cf. spirit „5. in mythology, religion, and idealistic philosophy—an embodied, adored entity, the organizer of being” and the soul “3. reli. immaterial, immortal human being, giving life to the body and separating from it at death“). The article refers to that dictionary, but both meanings are mistakenly attributed to the word spirit (p. 88). In addition, a couple of non-linguistic articles have been added. These are the article “Stasys Šalkauskis — the pioneer of methodology in scientific work” reprinted from the fourth book of Acta Paedagogica Vilnensia (1997) and the article “How to learn languages” published in the aforementioned publication of Western Baltic Languages and Culture Relics. In general, the articles of the thoughtful linguist V. Sirtautas are interesting to read, although in places somewhat fragmentary, could be better decorated. They raise thoughts, reading them often makes you want to argue with the author, to explain or check something more extensively. In this they are extremely useful, because they contribute to the progress of the reader and of the science itself. All five doc. R. Petkevičienė's articles were published in scientific periodicals of linguistics (Kalbotyra, Filologija ir metodika, Filologija and Linguistica Lettica) in 1977-1999 and all of them investigate various types of open initial syllables of non-consonant Lithuanian words. In these articles, the initial syllables of words of the types #CV-, #CCCV-, #CCVC,, #CCCVC,_ and #CVC_ are examined in depth with numerous numerical data presented in the text and in numerous tables, based on the diphthongs of Lithuanian words and their diphthong genders, which are included in the second edition of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language Dictionary. In the first articles of the cycle in Unconjugated words articles are called non-prepositional and unconjugated words (see p. 106 of the reviewed book). 204 | REVIEWS explained the methodology of work and the basis of material selection. The latter are slightly different (initially, not only international, but also dialects and obsolete words were rejected, in addition, from the second article the genders of the two-syllable selected words were counted), so the numerical data presented in not all articles are compatible. The articles are essentially computational in nature — they constantly provide quantitative data of the collected material, show all detected initial samples of consonant phonemes, as well as their combination with all detected cases of syllable base expression. It is even calculated how many syllables of each type could be in the language and, comparing with existing syllables, the decimals of realization and frequency are shown. It is true, that some proofreading errors will be found in the tables, for example, #Vtype syllables could be 11, there are 10, the realization is given as 99.9196 (p. 118, table 1), whereas it should be 90.91%; #CC. VC. syllables can be 428, detected 146, realized 51.95% (p. 129, table 1), and according to the presented figures should be 34.1196 and so on. An amateur reader may not be interested in the abundance of numbers, but for science it is a very important and necessary thing. The articles provide an accurate picture of the composition and distribution of the syllables studied. The linguist writes consistently, smoothly. As a result, her informative articles are not only interesting, but also easy to read. The only inconvenience for the reader is the use of different terms or their variants for the same concept. For example, in four of the five articles (with the exception of the first, the oldest) the terms syllable centre and syllable nucleus are used in continuous interchange, in all articles — here vowel phonemes, consonant phonemes, here vowel phonemes, consonant phonemes, and occasionally also vowel phonemes (p. 159). In some places these similarities even converge in the same sentence, e.g.: „Of the vowel phonemes forming #C+V combinations (my —St. K. is emphasized everywhere here) the unstressed (short) vowel phonemes have the greatest ability to connect consonant phonemes“ (p. 115); “Some initial phonemes and archiphonemes, rare and before the monophonic syllable center, # CVC__type biphonic nuclei do not connect at all [...]” (p. 162); “The connection of the phonemes of individual consonants to the extended nucleus complies with the limitations of the distribution against vowel phonemes: if a single consonant phoneme cannot be connected to the monophonic vowel nucleus, it is not connected to the extended center beginning with that vowel phoneme” (p. 159). This interchange of terms distracts the reader — his attention is constantly diverted from the thoughts themselves to their expression, and a less experienced reader may even get a headache. In the professional (so, also scientific) language, such a variety of terms or other designations is not a good thing. Almost all (five out of six) doc. C. Grenda's articles are from his main area of interest —syntax. The article “The marking of more complex syntactic relationships in word combinations and sentences” discusses non-standard, although not rare, cases of word and gender relationships and shows how to represent these relationships. This article, published two decades ago in the Journal of Teaching and Educational Issues (1980, vol. 13), should be relevant, especially for educational matters, even now. In a large article “Verb compounds with object communicativeness”, first published in Linguistics (1965), there is a detailed analysis of word compounds in which “the action of the principal member is performed by one actor, and the action of the accessory communicativeness — by another actor” (p. 195), e.g.: tell him to go, urge him to hurry. Both compounds are examined separately, divided into groups according to the meanings of the verbs acting as the main member (command, permission, request, prohibition, shift, etc.), and in those groups the types of word compounds are distinguished. The statements are derived from a wealth of | living language, folklore, fictional literature material, a number of beautiful examples are included. In some places there are accurate remarks about the characteristics of the combinations of some of the types of words under consideration used in individual regions and their reliability in the current common language. For example, after thinking, the articles of Č. Grenda are written very clearly, powerfully, the thoughts are not only well thought out, but also precisely expressed. His articles are easy to read even after the day's work. This collective collection of well-known linguists’ writings is interesting and necessary for research and teaching purposes. The idea of Šiauliai University to honour its prominent teachers and scientists in this way is beautiful and welcome. This is probably the first meaningful commemoration of the anniversary of living Lithuanian linguists in our region. Stasys Keinys Received 2001 12 18 termin(dktl.mii.lt RECENTIES | 205 Why are such compounds formed as Padėk mums lineliy rauti, ryžių pjauti (J. Jablonskis), and having recalled that they are used in Eastern Lithuania, Č. Grenda cautiously states that they are “hardly suitable for common language” (p. Caution is certainly not out of place — if someone used such a construction, should teachers, lecturers or editors attack to correct it? In addition to the commonly used things, the common language must also leave room for rarer or only known to the users of a certain region word combinations, words or their genders. Important syntactic issues are also addressed in the articles “Semantics of the verb and structure of the word combination” (from the book “Semantics of the single sentence”, 1982), “Opposition of the features of determination/indetermination in verb constructions with nouns” (Kalbotyra, 1979) and “The syntactic role of communicativeness in the sentence” (Soviet School, 1980, no. 3). Incidentally, it is not clear why in the latter article, next to the auxiliary verb biti, “indicating only time and order” (p. 272), the verbs duotis and likti are entered in parentheses. Would they also be considered auxiliary verbs here (but see verb morphology), or is it just the ambiguity of the term or its inaccuracy of use? Since ancient times, grammar researchers have been concerned about the attribute. Is it a verb form (i.e., attributable to a verb) or an adverb? In 1974, he published the article "On the characteristic of the local language in the system of parts" in which he discussed this issue. With his characteristic care, Plato gives what, in his opinion, connects the attribute with the adverb, and then briefly mentions what it differs from the adverb. At the end of the article it is concluded that the adjective “completely does not coincide with neither the verb nor the adverb” (p. 267), but the most prominent characteristics connecting it with the adverb, so “it would be far more appropriate to consider it not as a specific form of the verb, but as a specific subclass of the adverb” (ibid.). It is a pity that, while writing this article, C. Grenda, as a good syntaxist, did not think about the role of the syntactic attribute in more detail — after all, J. Jablonskis had already mentioned that “This gender (attribut) goes in the sentence as the word of the circumstance of the way or simply as a certain part of the adverb” (RR I 326). The latter idea deserves more attention than has been shown so far. It is especially useful if the attribute is associated with repetition typical of our language in general, cf. senas senas, naujut naujutėlis, puikiausių puikiausias, stipriausių stipriausiai, vienai vienas, kalnų kalnai, vargai vargeliai, ėjo ėjo, išjojo jojo, kalbék nekalbėjęs, etc. In this way, the adjective appears to be inseparable from the verb. Although in the new grammar it is moved to the adverb, the period is certainly not placed, just as it was not placed when it was written as a verb form. Lietuvių kalbos institutas Antakalnio g. 6, 2055 Vilnius, Lietuva