Syntactic realisations of adverbials in English and Lithuanian

• Žurnalo archyvas: straipsnio tekstas

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Prieveiksmiai; Sintaksinės konstrukcijos; Prielinksninės konstrukcijos; Daiktavardinės frazės; Baigtiniai sakiniai; Nebaigtiniai sakiniai; Adverbials; Syntactic realisations; Prepositional phrases; Noun phrases; Finite clauses; Non-finite clauses; Case system.

ENAdverbials may be easily confused with similar elements not considered adverbials, as they are variable in their syntactic realisations and semantic flexibility. This highly variable nature of adverbials poses some difficulty in their analysis when translating, learning or using overall. The sample of texts analysed in this paper was taken from online telecommunications pages. The data of analysis consisted of 500 instances of adverbials in the English and Lithuanian languages. The focus in this paper is on circumstance adverbials as this class of adverbials is the biggest in both languages under inspection. Although languages under comparison have different structures, the frequency of adverbials and semantic distribution across the texts analysed were found to be similar. Major differences are in the syntactic realisations, due to the case system present in Lithuanian and absent in English. English adverbials in technical texts are mostly realised by prepositional phrases due to the lack of the case system in English. On the other hand, Lithuanian adverbials are mostly syntactically realised by nouns of different grammatical cases, although other realisations are also possible. [From the publication]