| Abstract [eng] |
This master’s thesis examines matter and pattern borrowings in Samuel Boguslaw Chylinski’s mid-17th-century Lithuanian New Testament translation. It combines a systematic inventory of contact-conditioned vocabulary with a focused semantic case study of the preposition ant and its polysemy. The empirical basis of the research is a close analysis of three books: the Gospel of Matthew, the Epistle to the Romans, and the Revelation to John. The exceptionally high frequency of ant, and its status as the most common preposition in the text, motivates a principled inquiry into whether the observed distribution reflects internally motivated semantic extension or, rather, contact-induced functional reallocation linked to translation practices and bilingual competence. Methodologically, the thesis integrates contact-linguistic classification with historical lexicology and cognitive semantics. Candidate borrowings are checked against lexicographic and etymological sources, differentiated into loanwords and calques, and grouped by semantic domains to enable both quantitative and qualitative interpretation. The assessment of model-text pressure relies on systematic comparison with parallel traditions, especially the Polish Gdańsk Bible and the Dutch Statenvertaling. In the semantic part, ant is described as a radial network anchored in a prototypical spatial configuration (contact on a surface) and extended into non-spatial domains through motivated re-profiling. The analysis applies principled criteria for distinguishing contextual variation from encoded senses and pays particular attention to possible overlap and contamination between Polish na and nad patterns in the Lithuanian translation. Overall, the study provides an explicitly argued and methodologically transparent account of borrowings and structural replications in the selected books of Chylinski’s New Testament, clarifies the interaction between translation strategy and contact-driven change, and contributes to the description of early Lithuanian written language by modelling the polysemous structure of ant in a historically and linguistically grounded manner. |
