[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian] The research into the perception and production of English rhythm has been a subject of argument among linguists and language educators for decades. English has traditionally been ascribed to the group of stress-timed rhythm languages as opposed to syllable-timed languages (Pike, 1945; Abercrombie, 1967; Ladefoged, 1975) and even though several scholars find this typological classification of languages contraversive (e.g. Dauer, 1987), certain reliable stress-timed acoustic cues remain relevant to EFL learners and help acquiring the natural sound of English. The particular rhythmic cues determine the alternation of weak and strong syllable sequences as well as the implication of certain aspects of connected speech. The EFL learners need to develop the feel for this specific English rhythm and educators worldwide suggest various natural input strategies and practice techniques. This particular paper argues for the implementation of music in order to develop the feel for English rhythm, since there is emerging evidence that language and music share a number of features at evolutionary, cognitive as well as sensory perceptual levels (Patel, 2003; Mithen, 2005; Jackendoff, 2009). Moreover, the two capacities of the human mind are similar in their expressive features as well as their hierarchic structure including the prosody: stress, meter and rhythm. Scholars in the field argue that EFL learners may benefit from this cross-domain influence, since the interaction of linguistic stress and musical meter enhances the perception and production of natural English rhythm (Besson et al., 2008). The particular experimental study was carried out on a cohort of 29 non-native English students of different linguistic backgrounds, who were exposed to selected sentence patterns through musically rhythmical expertise. The results suggested benefits in English speech rhythm: they demonstrated a better skill in stressing, strong / weak syllable production and recognition as well as vowel reduction. Keywords : rhythm, rhythmic typology, stress-timing, vowel reduction, music instruction DOI: https://doi.org/10.15823/zz.2018.19

[full article and abstract in Lithuanian; abstract in English] The language and spelling of fiction, scientific literature, journalism and other literature are usually edited in an exemplary manner. The true language of writers is well illustrated by the letters they wrote. The language of the letters of the Lithuanian literary classic Balys Sruoga is incredibly distant from the language of the works published. The letters are full of various types of mistakes. Long and short vowels are confused, nasal letters are very often left out in accusative singular and genitive plural cases, in singular and plural endings of nominative cases of active participles, in the roots of verbs, as well as there are incorrectly written forms where there is consonant assimilation. The causes of mistakes are different. At the beginning of the 20th century, the spelling of the Lithuanian language was not yet properly standardized. But the main reason was that B. Sruoga did not study at any Lithuanian school. The writer graduated from Panevėžys Realschool, where all the subjects were taught in Russian. Later on, he studied at the universities of Petrograd, Moscow, and Munich. Mistakes are made due to his inaccuracy, as well as for psychological reasons. In the letters where the author complains of a bad mood, tells about disasters or failures he has experienced, there are usually numerous mistakes. B. Sruoga’s letters contain poems or their insertions, some letters exist as separate texts of fiction. The writer is much more focused on the intense search for stylistic variants rather than on spelling. Lithuanian writers often use dialect forms and words from their native dialects. B. Sruoga is unique in this regard. He uses not only his own, but also other forms of Lithuanian dialectal words, such as the illative case, the supine, the dual form of predicates and verbs, infinitive forms of dialect verbs, subjunctive and imperative mood forms, and others. The letters in question employ a large number of foreign words (mainly Slavisms), especially literally translated Slavic constructions. Keywords: Balys Sruoga, ego documents, orthography, dialectal elements, barbarisms, neologisms. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15823/zz.2018.12

The article analyses the plays, conditionally called historical plays, of Kostas Ostrauskas (1926-2012), the most prominent Lithuanian emigre playwright and avant-garde writer. It discusses the principles of selection and interpretation of historical material, as well as stylistic and genre rewriting. An assumption is made about the links between Ostrauskas’s plays and postmodern historiography and the ideas of New Historicism. Ostrauskas significantly revived the Lithuanian historical drama, although he did not cut off ties with tradition (a play Stasiukas). His works cover world politics (Temptations and Emperor and His Empire) and the 18th-20th c. events of Lithuanian history. He puts a satirical spin on the destructiveness of various regimes (Tsar and Soviet), points to the recurrence of situations in art, music, Christian myths, and Lithuanian folklore. The playwright adjusts the understanding of a historical subject by putting forward ordinary people and losers. He also demonstrates the capabilities of the micro-history by skillfully using the genre of microdrama (The Welder, Napoleon, A Crow and A Chicken, A Loge and An Ax). Ostrauskas explores the intersection of literary and historical discourse, also the importance of myths, sagas, and legends in history. By drawing reader’s attention to (tragic)comic moments of history, the playwright portraits history as an odd and anecdotal event, as a play and a ritual with elements of absurd, grotesque, mask and marionette theater. He focuses on historical truth, memory, and history (Cicinskas and Stasiukas), and highlights the plurality and the paradox of truth. Keywords: historical drama, postmodern historiography, Kostas Ostrauskas, minor history, historical memory, comical. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15823/zz.2018.3

The article analyses the contextualisation of innerness that took place in the philosophy of the 20th century. The doctrine that enabled this process is called contextualism. There is a distinction between the contextualisation of innerness in the weak and strong contextualism. Weak contextualism explores various instances of contextual innerness, while strong contextualism seeks to formulate general methodological principles on the nature of contextual innerness and language. The position of philosophical classicism is stated as an alternative to contextualism; it brings back the truth and a person’s identity to philosophical thinking. According to the latter philosophical position, the identity of the philosopher is his truth. Although the problems of classical philosophy are reinstated, philosophical classicism avoids naïve realism and seeks to learn the lessons of Kant, Wittgenstein, and Deridda.

The aim of the present research is to make a contrastive analysis of that-deletion in complement that-clauses in English and Lithuanian on the basis of corpus data. All the data for analysis are collected from the British National Corpus and the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language. That-deletion in complement that-clauses is studied in terms of distribution across registers, the properties of the matrix verbs and the structural properties of the clauses.

Merging Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with Cognitive Linguistics (CL) has brought new perspectives to analysing social reality (Van Dijk, 2001; Musolff 2004; CharterisBlack, 2005; Hart, 2010). Accordingly, this paper adopts Critical Metaphor Analysis as first suggested by Charteris-Black (2005, 2014) and seeks to investigate a social phenomenon – the financial and economic crisis – in Lithuanian and British media. The aim of the research is to analyse to what extent the media in the UK and Lithuania conceptualize differently the financial and economic crisis via the force metaphor. The paper explains the force metaphor by employing the Force-Dynamics System (Talmy, 2000), according to which a crisis is conceptualized following the patterns crisis as the agonist and crisis as the antagonist. The findings demonstrate that the pattern of the crisis as the agonist with the scenarios of aggression, affecting something or somebody, natural force, loss, suffering and resistance prevails in both discourses. The pattern of the crisis as the antagonist with such scenarios as causing crisis, fighting against crisis, overcoming crisis falls behind. Though Lithuanian and British discourses differ in how they construct the scenarios, the rhetorical impact of the force metaphor is achieved similarly through telling a coherent story of the crisis: the crisis is a dangerous, threatening and aggressive entity, which affects the country and its people; it is apparently uncontrollable, and losses and suffering are inevitable; we look into the causes of the crisis, we fight against it and finally we overcome it.

Tourism discourse, being an important sphere of the modern world, has become the object of numerous scientific studies, including linguistic ones. The studies of different languages reveal that lexical loanwords are particularly characteristic of the said domain as a specific means of discourse creation. The current article presents the first study on lexical loanwords in Lithuanian tourism discourse. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of the loanwords in tourism discourse has been conducted in terms of their semantics, origin, integration into the language system and text, as well as the significance of loanwords as a means of tourism discourse creation is considered.

Straipsnyje aptariama koncepto kaip vientiso geštalto vieneto, objektyvuoto kalboje, rekonstrukcijos ir modeliavimo problema. Remiantis I. Bunino prozoje aptinkamo vandens koncepto analize, parodomos subkoncepto kaip atskiros sudedamosios mentalinio suvokinio dalies panaudojimo galimybės dekonstruojant vientisą prasminį domeną – konceptą. Subkoncepto kaip analizės instrumento panaudojimas kognityvinuose tyrimuose, autorės nuomone, padeda nustatyti santykį tarp žodyje objektyvuotų ir jo determinuojamų atskirų leksemos reikšmių ir atskirų pažinimo struktūrų. Be to, žodyje ir jo reikšmėse implikuotų kognityvinių žinių išskaidymas panaudojant subkonceptą kaip analizės instrumentą padeda rekonstruoti konceptą kaip vientisą mentalinę visumą, dalyvaujančią formuojant kalbos turinio raiškos ir pasaulėvaizdžio specifiką.

In the article, the syntactic potential of English is explored by carrying out a functional syntactic analysis of Carson McCullers’ short stories. The analysis shows that the main causes of noncanonical ordering of sentence elements in English are thematization by means of preposing and rhematization by postposing sentence elements. The preposed elements were semantically diverse, though the frequency of occurrence of different process type sentences varied. The postposed elements were process-specific. The ‘syntactic configurations’ of the canonical word order were determined by particular semantic, structural and contextual restrictions.

Straipsnyje analizuojama, koks imagoantropologinis Štuthofo konclagerio latvių tautinės bendruomenės vaizdinys iškyla Balio Sruogos Dievų miške. Aiškinamasi, kaip subjektyvūs ar objektyvūs latvių bruožai susiejami su konkrečiomis asmenybėmis, kurios asmenybės nutylimos ar išskaitomos „tarp eilučių“, kokios yra to aprašymo ar nutylėjimo intencijos, potekstės, kontekstai. Aptariama, kiek ir kokio pobūdžio informacijos Latvijos skaitytojai turėjo apie Dievų mišką ir 1968 m. Rygoje pasirodžiusį jo vertimą į latvių kalbą (Dievu mežs). Atkreipiamas dėmesys, kad latviškame vertime, orientuojantis į rusiškąjį, yra praleistas sakinys, kuris daugiausia apibendrina knygoje esantį imagoantropologinį latvių aprašymą, bet gali būti suprastas kaip ne visai korektiškas. Pateikiama informacija, kaip Sruogos knygą ir joje esantį latvių vaizdinį 1968–1969 m. ir vėliau vertino Latvijoje gyvenę buvę Štuthofo konclagerio kaliniai, koks jų santykis su Dievų miške aprašytais konkrečiais įvykiais ir faktais.