Res Humanitariae

Šiame „Res humanitariae“ numeryje pristatomi gana plataus spektro lingvistinių reiškinių tyrimai. Taip pat įvairios ir tiriamosios kalbos: aptariami tam tikri lietuvių, anglų, rusų, latvių, ukrainiečių, lenkų, armėnų kalbų dalykai atskirai arba kurias nors kalbas gretinant.

This paper examines language policy options as they relate to post-colonial primary education in Creole-speaking multi-ethnic Caribbean states. It first discusses the different roles of English and vernacular languages, the former as the language of instruction in formal education and the latter as interactional languages within local communities. It concludes with theoretically based practical notes on language teaching appropriate to each policy option. This paper uses as an illustrative example the language policies in bi-ethnic Guyana and addresses the critical issue whether the Ministry of Education, through social aspects of its policies, should take responsibility for community languages or ignore community languages in order to focus on early proficiency in the English language. The controversial decision is to what extent primary education should emphasise high English inputs for early academic attainment or prioritise community language inputs for promotion of social equity. This paper considers three language policy options, one policy option matching each of these extremes and one addressing the middle ground. Each policy option is contingent on three decision criteria: density of entry languages, available resources and the extent to which communities value their languages. These policy options are: (i) English language immersion, (ii) Transitional language policy and (iii) Bilingual policy. The three policies options are illustrated with comparative examples from several pluri-ethnic states.

The research explores the compatibility of syntactic characteristics of legal English and plain English. The paper analyses the competition of linguistic means of expression between plain English and legal English. To this end, the paper (1) explores the characteristics of legal writing and identifies syntactic features that cause comprehension problems; (2) analyses syntactic features and means of expression of plain English; (3) investigates the compatibility of the requirements for plain English with the characteristics of legal English. The research is based on the Treaty of Lisbon. The findings prove that although formal requirements for legal English are compatible with the requirements for plain English, there is a great difference between the means of expression of the two variations. Nevertheless, plain English principles allow appropriate user-friendly syntactic competitors for most complicated cases of syntax in legal writing.

The research considers the features and requirements for legal language and plain language with the purpose to analyse legalese in the context of plain language as a means to ensure clear expert-to-layman communication. The findings based on the analysis of the text of the Treaty of Lisbon show that many typical lexical features of legal language cause vagueness and impede the reader’s perception. Nowadays, the use of legalese is not restricted to the legal profession any more. Therefore, recently the principles of plain language have started being applied to official documentation with the emphasis on precision, clarity of expression, avoidance of unnecessary details, etc. The ever-increasing demand for clear expert-to-layman communication naturally increased the demand for intralingual translation by applying plain language principles to legal language.

The paper focuses on the concept ‘new’ and the reasons of its great influence on modern advertising discourse. This concept is of special significance for the production of modern advertising texts. Most of the goods, which are advertised in the magazine ‘Cosmopolitan’, are positioned as new, recently launched, non-existent before.A good may be advertised in two ways: as reliable, durable and as new. The first method is rarely used, while the second is becoming more dominant – the word ‘new’ does not only appear on new goods, but it is also observable on the goods that have been already existing in the market for a long period of time.A considerable frequency of words meaning ‘new’ indicates that the concept ‘new’ is very important for modern society. Despite the ‘newness words’ (новый, новинка, новшество, инновация), there is a group of lexemes, united by the newness semantics, in advertising texts: these are words that acquire such meaning only in the context.

This article analyzes the proper use of various meanings of the adjective draugiškas ‘friendly’. It discusses the semantic structure of this adjective and its different interpretation in the Dictionary of Modern Lithuanian Language and in the Dictionary of Lithuanian Language. The semantic structure of the adjective draugiškas has been specified based on the data collected from the Corpus of Modern Lithuanian Language and other sources, the problem of its figurative use is discussed, and its validity from the stand point of proper usage of new meanings such as „safe“, „harmless“, „comfortable“ is evaluated. The data was collected from various functional styles and the conducted survey shows the real use of the modern adjective draugiškas. In addition, it shows that some of the phrases used with this word that are indicated as incorrect by users, are not violating the norms of language use. The appropriateness of new phrases, such as draugiškas restoranas, draugiška kuprinė, is discussed.

The aim of the present research is to analyse and to discuss the linguistic expressions and the semantic paradigm of the images of the sunflower in bloom that have formed in Lithuanian poetry. The methodological basis of the research is cognitive linguistics. The paper verifies that visual features of the sunflower in bloom are emphasized in poetry. The sunflower is perceived as a large in shape object that shines and moves (swings, sways and rises, bends, turns to the sun) or keeps one’s balance. The indicated features are the basis of metaphorical names of the plant.

The paper deals with the studying of means of expression of the predicative centre of sentences with pronominal-infinitive complex on the semantic-syntactical and the formal-grammatical levels. Different approaches to the determination of syntactical matter of such constructions are defined, the fact of non-belonging of the infinitive to their predicative centre is revealed. The predicative centre of every type of sentences with pronominal-infinitive complex (two-member and mononuclear) is determined, the ways (structural-semantic and semantic) and means (modal and phasal lexemes) of their complication are described.

The usage of phrasemes evidences not only their variability, transformations and modifications, but also the most frequent forms of their realization (phraseme-types) and frequency (phraseme-tokens), i.e. phrasemes’ flexibility. In this paper, selected Lithuanian idiomatic predicate phrasemes are analysed in the Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian Language, in the Phraseological Dictionary and in the lexical database of the Dictionary of Lithuanian Phrases. The results of comparison show that the corpus research can give rich evidence about the morphological flexibility of phrasemes. This information can help to improve representation of phrasemes in the phraseological dictionaries of Lithuanian, in order to make them more usage-based and more usage-oriented.

Polish language in Latgale today is only one of many languages spoken in the local community. The Polish minority here forms seven per cent of population but Polish language, which extended to the territory during the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, is in fact threatened with extinction. The regiolect in question is mainly exposed to the influence of the Russian and to a smaller extent Latvian language, thus it extensively incorporates foreign linguistic units. The report aims at describing some structural and semantic peculiarities of verbs functioning in the spoken variety of Latgalian Polish. Current research is based on interviews with eighty-six Poles born from 1922 till 2006 representing all generations of the local Polish minority.