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Taikomoji kalbotyra
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This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Online) 2029-8935
Published by Vilnius University

[39 journals]

Unharmonious early bilingualism in inter-ethnic Lithuanian emigrant
familie
- Authors: Inga Hilbig
  Pages: 1 - 20
  Abstract: The article seeks to investigate the main reasons that cause inharmonious early bilingualism in inter-ethnic Lithuanian emigrant families. The data consist of extracts from 25 semi-structured interviews with Lithuanian women and Facebook comments of such emigrant mothers. Firstly, the study identifies the reasons why some informants themselves do not speak Lithuanian in their families, which leads to their children not even being able to understand it. These reasons can be lack of knowledge about the nature of early simultaneous bilingualism with a minority language, weak or negative attitudes towards Lithuanian and / or Lithuania, urgent need to fully integrate, influence of non-Lithuanian speaking partners, dominance of the majority language over bilingual mothers, and children’s passive bilingualism or insufficient comprehension skills. On their part, children can be growing up passively bilingual because of the minority language input shortage, not enough possibilities and real need to practice it in their daily lives, and because mothers tolerate bilingual conversations with certain discourse strategies. Finally, this paper examines the factors determining underdeveloped or attriting competences in the minority language. Children might be able to participate in very simple colloquial conversations in Lithuanian but cannot express themselves more freely in it or on different topics. They lack higher quality and more various input, e.g. through books or films in the Lithuanian language. They protest against minority language classes, where they could have a chance to learn to read and write in the minority language and further develop their skills. The analysis has revealed a variety of different reasons and their complex combinations that contribute to inharmonious bilingualism with Lithuanian as a minority language. They are objective and subjective, primary and secondary, sociolinguistic, psychological, pedagogical, and maybe some other reasons. A crucial role is played by mothers’ negative emotions in the face of struggles and children’s resistance, which also negatively affects success in bilingual child-rearing.
  PubDate: 2020-06-16
  DOI: 10.15388/Taikalbot.2020.14.1
Morphology Features of the Suffixal Slang Adverbs in the Lithuanian
Language: Hybrid Suffixcal Derivatives -ai formed from the Suffixal
Adjectives -iškas and from the Primary Adjectives
- Authors: Robertas Kudirka
  Pages: 21 - 32
  Abstract: This article is one part of the research of adverbs in Lithuanian slang. Although there is no systematic and comprehensive research into the Lithuanian language slang, slang is commonly believed to be chaotic and have no grammatical system. The purpose of this article is to morphologically examine the derivatives formed with suffix -ai from the adjectives with suffix -iškas and from the primary adjectives without suffixes. The material (79 adverbs) is collected from the dictionary of Lithuanian slang and the dictionary of non-standard Lithuanian. The study aims to identify the systematic morphological features. To achieve the aim the research words are classified according to their suffixes, their origin is determined and morphological analysis is performed.
  The research reveals that a foreign language unit that emerges in the context of another language undergoes assimilation - it is transformed in one way or another by adapting it to the linguistic system. In Lithuanian slang, adverbs with the suffix -ai are mostly made up from hybrid adjectives of Russian origin with the suffix -iškas. There is also a number of adverbs formed from English hybrid adjectives. A few are derived from semantically neologic adjectives. The majority of suffixal -ai derivatives that are formed from primary adjectives are Russian origin. Adverbs which are derived from the adjectives with the suffix -iškas always retain the accent in the root: this pattern is common to all slang adverbs. All forms of adverbial degrees have accented suffixes. The findings of the reseach reveal that the morphological features of the studied slang adverbs have undergone certain transformations and follow the regularities of the Lithuanian language system: the slang adverbs copy derivative models of the standard language.
  PubDate: 2020-06-16
  DOI: 10.15388/Taikalbot.2020.14.2
Is it reliable and valid if it is not replicable' On the importance of
replicability in quantitative research
- Authors: Loreta Vilkienė, Laura Vilkaitė-Lozdienė, Rita Juknevičienė, Justina Bružaitė-Liseckienė, Kinga Geben, Birutė Ryvitytė
  Pages: 33 - 38
  Abstract: The idea of this paper arose in a reading group of several colleagues at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University after a discussion of a review article published by the editors of Language Teaching. Titled ‘Replication studies in language learning and teaching’ (2008), the paper focuses on replication studies and argues that they should be promoted and valued no less than original research. The participants of the reading group agreed that replication studies, understood here primarily as replications of quantitative research, are indeed an important issue that could be of interest to the broader community of applied linguists in Lithuania. The present paper argues that attempts to replicate earlier studies, which are very scarce or non-existent in Lithuania, deserve more attention both from novice and mature researchers. Replications are particularly valuable in developmental studies where replicating a study over a period of time allows the researcher to obtain data for continued analysis. Furthermore, a replication of a published study that deals with data collected in one country offers an opportunity to verify its findings in a different context and this way consolidates our understanding of phenomena under study. Finally, replication is an invaluable learning method to a novice linguist, be it a senior undergraduate or postgraduate student. Thus the authors of this paper would like to promote the idea of replication research in our community as well as encourage everyone interested make use of the increasingly growing amount of open access data available on the internet.
  PubDate: 2020-06-16
  DOI: 10.15388/Taikalbot.2020.14.3
Actual decomposition of the L2 French noun phrase in the predicate
construction in the final written examination
- Authors: Vitalija Kazlauskienė
  Pages: 39 - 49
  Abstract: The noun phrase (NP), one of the key elements of a sentence, can reveal the characteristics of a learner’s linguistic competence. The present study focuses on actual decomposition of NP in the predicate construction. This is when the attribute elements of a noun phrase are included in the predicate construct as factor-actualized determinants. In this position, the copula verb is merely a grammatical means of allowing the attribute to become a predicate (Gaulmyn, Basset 1991: 177).
  The aim of the study being a more thorough investigation of the criteria and peculiarities of producing this type of predicate constructs in learner language, the present research is based on the empirical material from the Lithuanian learner corpus. The paper briefly discusses the concept of the predicate construction and describes the process of compiling the learner corpus as well as the principles of data selection. The analysis of the NP in a predicate construction is then presented, and the characteristic cases from the corpus data are examined. The main limitation of the present study is related to the scope of the learner corpus. Having summarized the results of the quantitative and qualitative research, the following conclusions were formulated. The learner language is dominated by NP predicate constructions with an adjective more often than a noun. As to the verb conjunction, the typical attribute verb être ‘to be’ was the only one widely used in the corpus under investigation. The analysis of the corpus data also revealed a number of specific errors that are typical of the learners’ written language. In general, the predictive constructions in the learners’ language are characterized by the omission of redundancy tags in the grammatical categories of gender and number. The analysis of the learner corpus provided a broader look at the NP in a predicate construction, highlighting the simplicity, conciseness and repetition of this construct. The results of the study are important for a more comprehensive description of the learners’ language, for solving problems in foreign language analysis, and for contributing to the quality of teaching and learning the French language.
  PubDate: 2020-06-19
  DOI: 10.15388/Taikalbot.2020.14.4
Coverage of the 2008-2009 Economic Crisis in the Media and Relationship of
the Coverage to Actual Situation
- Authors: Vilija Tauraitė
  Pages: 50 - 71
  Abstract: The primary goal of this paper is to examine the coverage of the 2008-2009 economic crisis in the Lithuanian online media as well as its relationship to the actual economic situation and perception of media consumers. The theoretical basis for this research is made up of the theories of agenda-setting and framing. The coverage of the media is assessed on the basis of the corpus of economic reporting in 2006–2014 in two Lithuanian media sources, the news agency BNS and DELFI news website, by analysing the volume and the tone of the reports. The coverage in the media is then compared to some statistical economic indicators.
  The main findings of the paper are the following:
  1. The coverage of the crisis in the media reflected rather accurately the actual situation: the fluctuations of the volume of the reports largely followed the timeline of the main events of the crisis. The correlation between the reporting tone and industrial production index as a gauge of the economic situation was rather high, which supports the adequacy of the coverage. The relationship between the reporting and economic indicators was found to be stronger in the case of the BNS than in DELFI.
  2. Negative reports were found to be dominating over positive ones. It is partially inevitable due to the context of the crisis, but the effect of the general media negativity bias cannot be ruled out either.
  3. During the year of the worst economic situation, the number of the reports of both highly negative and highly positive tone increased, but the volume of the two extremes decreased with the improvement of the economic situation. This might suggest that the media was aiming to counterweight the flow of very negative news during the crisis.
  4. On average, the tone of the BNS news agency coverage was more positive than that of DELFI. The factors behind this trend could be the linguistic features of the reporting style (usage of intensifying modal words as well as negatively or positively image-evoking lexis) and the intention to attract attention from the audience.
  5. Certain asymmetry was noticed in the public reaction to the coverage of the crisis in the media as media consumers reacted more rapidly and for a longer time period to the deterioration in the reporting tone than to its improvement.
  6. The correlation to media coverage was stronger in the case of the consumer sentiment indicator rather than in the case of the indicator for consumer behaviour (retail trade turnover index).
  It should be noted that the analysis was limited to only two media channels, so the inclusion of other media channels, especially television, could make such research more informative. Further research could include an additional corpus of reports with such keywords as “recession”, “recovery”, “growth”, “unemployment” and similar items. An analysis of the effects of linguistic factors alone on the reporting tone could also provide some interesting insights. Research on the coverage tone in relation to different subjects (economy, companies and political events) could be another valuable addition to the study.
  PubDate: 2020-08-13
  DOI: 10.15388/Taikalbot.2020.14.5
Neologisms in Hungarian terms of quality assurance
- Authors: Réka Sólyom
  Pages: 72 - 81
  Abstract: By employing a functional-cognitive frame, this paper, in which neologisms derived from English are analysed, focuses on the semantics of new Hungarian terms of quality assurance (quality management in general). Although the importance of unambiguous terms in scientific communication is often emphasised (Temmerman 2002: 211), it has been observed that the presence of conceptual metonymies and metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Panther and Thornburg 2003, Kövecses 2015) also fosters understanding of technical languages. The author’s previous research in the field of the semantics of Hungarian neologisms (e.g. Sólyom 2014a, b, 2016) has also revealed that the presence of metonymies and metaphors has a significant impact upon the process of meaning construal. The present research assumes that various metonymic and metaphorical meanings occur in the semantics of novel Hungarian terms of quality assurance. To attest this, examples from a questionnaire filled by Hungarian quality engineers in 2018 will be analysed. Another question addressed in this paper is whether there is a mental reason for the fact that although there are colloquial Hungarian words and expressions for describing the processes of manufacturing, experts in the field do not use them, but rather employ neologisms with English roots. Indeed, this is how specialists distinguish technical terms from everyday expressions.
  PubDate: 2020-08-13
  DOI: 10.15388/Taikalbot.2020.14.6