Danguolės Mikulėnienės mokslinės veiklos metmenys

ASTA LESKAUSKAITĖ, VILIJA RAGAIŠIENĖ Institute of the Lithuanian Language OUTLINE OF DANGUOLĖ MIKULĖNIENĖ’S SCHOLARLY ACTIVITIES Photo by ASTA LESKAUSKAITĖ. In 2022, having celebrated a milestone birthday, Prof. Dr. Danguolė Mikulėnienė had already been working at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language for more than three decades (since 1990). In 2002, she succeeded Dr. Kazys Morkūnas as head of the Department of Language History and Dialectology, renamed the Centre of Geolinguistics in 2015, and continues to carry out these duties conscientiously, bringing together, motivating, and guiding her colleagues along paths that are sometimes particularly challenging. Prof. D. Mikulėnienė’s work is multifaceted and diverse—academic, pedagogical, public, and cultural. She is the author of numerous scholarly publications and teaching materials for general and higher education, a member of editorial boards of Lithuanian and foreign scholarly journals and other publications, a scholarly editor, compiler and reviewer, consultant, and organizer and participant in conferences and other events; she has also served as secretary and chair of the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language, among other roles. The linguist devotes considerable time and energy to public outreach—for example, delivering public lectures and presentations, visiting schools, and building ties with communities in various places. ASTA LESKAUSKAITĖ, VILIJA RAGAIŠIENĖ. Danguolės Mikulėnienės mokslinės veiklos metmenys 237 This linguist is an excellent teacher who has educated and continues to educate linguistics students at Lithuanian universities, and has also brought many of them to the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and encouraged them to pursue doctoral studies. Nevertheless, scholarly work occupies the largest and most important place in D. Mikulėnienė’s life. One of the early research topics she chose was Lithuanian accentuation (synchrony and diachrony). In 1987, under the supervision of Alekso Girdenio and Adelės Laigonaitės, she defended her candidate’s dissertation at Vilnius University, Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos galūninių vedinių metatonija. The researcher regards metatony as a morphonological phenomenon and demonstrated the synchronic and diachronic relationship between accentual contour alternation and stress placement in derived words. In scholarly articles, she also discussed other questions of accentuation: metatony in Lithuanian compounds, the development of inflected derivatives with the prefix *pā- and nominal derivatives with suffixes, the history of accentuation in pronominal adjectives, diachronic studies of metatony, and other topics. Her research over many years was brought together in the monograph published in 2005, Cirkumfleksinė metatonija lietuvių kalbos vardažodiniuose daiktavardžiuose ir jos kilmė. Another research direction of D. Mikulėnienė’s, related to accentuation, concerns contacts between the Baltic and Slavic languages. According to her, tendencies toward simplification of the accentual system can be observed in spoken Lithuanian. In particular, the defonologization of accentual contours and its effect on the subsequent development of stress in Lithuanian borderland dialects are evident in those dialects. D. Mikulėnienė substantiates this claim primarily with the example of the Gervėčiai dialect. However, borderland dialects are important not only for accentuation but also for morphology, lexicon, and other linguistic aspects. This prompted D. Mikulėnienė and K. Morkūnas to compile Dieveniškių šnektos tekstus (1997), in which, for the first time in the history of Lithuanian dialectology, various fluctuations in sound quality and quantity, as well as other features, were consistently marked. Later came Dieveniškių šnektos žodynas (vols. I–II, 2005–2010), prepared with K. Morkūnas, Aloyzas Vidugiris, and Laima Grumadienė (author of the first volume), and Zietelos šnektos tekstai (vols. I–II, 2005–2010), prepared with A. Vidugiris. Applying traditional dialectological methods alongside new sociolinguistic and geolinguistic approaches, she and a team of co-authors wrote the monograph Lietuvių tarmių kaita XXI a. pradžioje: Lenkijos lietuvių šnektos (2016). In the second half of the 20th century, the ongoing need to collect dialectal material and the areal study of Lithuanian dialects provided dialectologists with the impetus to develop new research programs. D. Mikulėnienė also became involved in these initiatives 238 BENDRINĖ KALBA | 95 preparatory work. She compiled two parts of the Program for the Study of Lithuanian Dialects and Their Interaction—Morphology (with K. Morkūnas, 1995) and Stress (with Bonifacas Stundžia, 1996). The history of Lithuanian linguistics and dialectology is an important and fascinating field of research, to which D. Mikulėnienė has devoted particular attention over the past decade. At academic conferences, other events, and in her published work, she continually presents new, previously unpublished facts about prominent and little-known linguists, and discusses descriptively and critically the significance of their work and scholarly ideas. The trilogy of monographs Lithuanian Dialectology: Genesis, Development and Paradigmatic Shifts is devoted to the emergence and development in linguistics of Lithuanian dialectology as a paradigm of language variation. The first volume, published a few years ago, was The Pre-Dialectological Period. The Beginnings of Lithuanian Dialectology: The Classification of Dialects, the Emergence of Research Perspectives and Their Types (2018). Applying the principles of linguistic historiography and critical linguistic analysis, this monograph discusses the pre-dialectological period and the beginnings of Lithuanian dialectology. Summarizing the results of her research, the author notes that “linguistics, like all the humanities, became a means of consolidating (and affirming) a certain local identity in the early twentieth century.” In the research study History of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language 1: The Institutionalization of the Lithuanian Language and Linguistics, published in 2021, D. Mikulėnienė draws on archival documents and other materials to revisit the beginnings of the institutionalization of the Lithuanian language and linguistics, and the activities of the Lithuanian Language Section of the Antanas Smetona Institute of Lithuanian Studies in 1939–1940. Another study, History of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language 2: The Annexation of Linguistics (2022), surveys the brief but exceptionally complex period of 1940–1952, which had a decisive impact on changes in Lithuanian linguistics. Tracing transformations across different periods, the author seeks to reveal the mechanism of annexation and how it operated, and to describe its most prominent features: the ideologization and bureaucratization of the activities of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and its staff, and the ideologization and simplification of scholarly content. Great curiosity and tenacity—qualities essential to a true scholar—prompted D. Mikulėnienė to pursue new approaches to research on Lithuanian dialects and to the dissemination of its results. Thus, as the UNESCO Chair Informatics for the Humanities was established at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics toward the end of the last decade of the previous century, and informatics began to develop rapidly in Lithuania, she conceived the innovative idea of presenting Lithuanian dialects to the general public in a modern way. Under D. Mikulėnienė’s leadership, and with dialectologists from the Institute of the Lithuanian Language collaborating with specialists from the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, ASTA LESKAUSKAITĖ, VILIJA RAGAIŠIENĖ. Danguolės Mikulėnienės mokslinės veiklos metmenys 239 a bilingual computer dictionary, Lithuanian Dialects = Lithuanian Dialects, was published (vol. 1, 2000; vol. 2, 2005; vol. 3, 2011). This work, K. Morkūnas’s support, membership in the International Society of Dialectologists and Geolinguists, and other factors encouraged the linguist to undertake broader geolinguistic research and to help establish in Lithuania this field, which was already developing successfully abroad. The first attempt to compare and contrast dialect data from the Baltic languages typologically was the prospectus for Baltų valodų atlants = The Atlas of the Baltic Languages = Atlas of the Baltic Languages, published in 2009 and prepared by dialectologists from the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and the Latvian Language Institute of the University of Latvia. D. Mikulėnienė was one of its principal authors and editors. Continuing this work, the first volume of the atlas, devoted to the vocabulary of flora, was published (first edition, 2012; second, revised and expanded edition, 2013). The second volume, describing the fauna vocabulary of the Baltic languages, has also been prepared but not yet published. From 2011 to 2014, a major project initiated and led by D. Mikulėnienė—the Global Grant project Contemporary Geolinguistic Research in Lithuania: Optimization of the Network of Localities and Interactive Dissemination of Dialectal Information—brought together more than thirty Lithuanian dialectologists and marked a significant qualitative leap in Lithuanian dialectology. In three and a half years, enormous work was accomplished: more than 700 localities in the Atlas of the Lithuanian Language were checked, and the geolinguistic situation of Lithuanian dialects and other languages at the beginning of the twenty-first century was assessed. From then on, new scholarly ideas began to circulate in Lithuanian dialectological discourse, along with new concepts and categories (the multimodal dialectology model, apparent time, dialectality markers, discourse, and others), and contemporary research methodologies and methods came into use. According to D. Mikulėnienė, this work should ensure continuity in research on Lithuanian dialects, provide new data for Baltic studies and comparative linguistics, create conditions for predictive sociolinguistic research, and help anticipate the further development of the Lithuanian language and its dialects. In fact, it opened up broad new research opportunities and prospects for Lithuanian dialectologists. Together with her colleagues, D. Mikulėnienė has already prepared and published important works employing the methodological approaches and methods of perceptual dialectology, geolinguistics, and sociolinguistics: Language Variation and Its Evaluation from the Perspective of Perceptual Dialectology: Images of Variants and Places (2018), A Dialectometric Classification of Traditional Lithuanian Dialects (2019), Lithuanian Language Varieties: The Perspectives of Researchers and Ordinary Members of the Speech Community (2020). 240 BENDRINĖ KALBA | 95 The results of other ongoing or completed studies are also awaiting publication. Many significant insights have also appeared in scholarly articles in various academic journals and other publications. One of D. Mikulėnienė’s recent initiatives is the Database of Lithuania’s Local Language Varieties, or Tarmynas1, now being developed at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language. It is intended to include all the dialectal resources collected and being collected at the Institute (audio recordings, texts transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet, linguists’ manuscripts, and more), making them readily accessible not only to researchers and the public in Lithuania but also abroad. The geospatial analysis of the Tarmynas data has already been piloted using ArcGIS platform tools, and will be expanded in the future. This database is presented in greater detail in the research study by D. Mikulėnienė and Agnė Čepaitienė, Tarmynas: A Database Model of Lithuania’s Local Varieties (2022)2. Thus, D. Mikulėnienė’s initiatives and work over the past two decades can undoubtedly be seen as the emergence of a new school of research. She readily involves her colleagues and students in the projects she initiates and leads. It is difficult to review and present all of D. Mikulėnienė’s work in a brief publication. Her scholarly and pedagogical activities are described in greater detail in the publication Danguolė Mikulėnienė. Bibliography., published by the Institute of the Lithuanian Language in 2022. ASTA LESKAUSKAITĖ Institute of the Lithuanian Language 5 Petro Vileišio St., LT-10308 Vilnius [email protected] VILIJA RAGAIŠIENĖ Institute of the Lithuanian Language 5 Petro Vileišio St., LT-10308 Vilnius [email protected] 1 See https://maps.lki.lt/portal/home/. 2 Čepaitienė Agnė, Mikulėnienė Danguolė. A Model of the Database of Local Lithuanian Varieties, Tarmynas, 2022. Available online: http://lki.lt/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Tarmynas-%E2%80%93-Lietuvos-vietiniu-kalbos-variantu-duomenu-bazes-modelis_galutinis.pdf. ASTA LESKAUSKAITĖ, VILIJA RAGAIŠIENĖ. Danguolės Mikulėnienės mokslinės veiklos metmenys 241