The Lithuanian genitive case is a category of complex semantics that consists of many interrelated meanings: possession, quantity, goal, material and many others. However, the present explorations of the Lithuanian genitive case have been carried out according to different theories, thus now Lithuanian linguistics lacks a comprehensive and consistent analysis. Therefore, the aim of this article is to review the findings of the existing Lithuanian genitive case researches, compare meaning descriptions of the Lithuanian genitive case provided therein and, having regard to the most important Cognitive Grammar principles, to provide critical insights why it would be important and significant to explore the genitive case according to the Cognitive Grammar principles, which have been being actively applied in foreign linguistics for the last two decades.
The article deals with the semantic analysis of antonymous Lithuanian adjectives šiltas–šaltas and their equivalents in English – adjectives warm–cold. Semantics and usage peculiarities of the adjectives are discussed and compared on the basis of corpus data, drawn from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language and the British National Corpus. Methods of corpus linguistics are applied to reveal collocability of the adjectives, prototypes and evaluation of the qualities they denote. Prototypical temperature meaning of the adjectives and its metaphorical extensions are discussed in the framework of cognitive linguistics (prototype theory and conceptual metaphor theory).
The article presents the realization of singular nominative case of active voice past tense feminine gender participles. It discusses what information on derivation of this kind of participles is given in some Lithuanian linguistics studies (grammars, morphology textbooks, study books, encyclopaedias, etc.). The focus is on the modern usage of active voice past tense participles of feminine gender. The research is based on rich empirical material: examples are drawn from the texts of 27 authors (mainly works of poetry and prose) and Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian Language (non-fiction, journalism, and spoken language). In the light of the analysis of the empirical material it is concluded that besides normative active voice feminine past tense participles with ending (dirbus-i), the modern language (especially in the artistic and journalistic texts) allows the usage of the variant without ending (dirbus) which is rarely mentioned in the works of linguistics.