| Abstract [eng] |
In the present paper, an attempt is made to analyse the personified semantic roles of the words tree and medis in English and Lithuanian within the framework of functional linguistics the proponents of which are M. A. K. Halliday (1994), Van Valin and LaPolla (2002), etc. In functional linguistics, semantic roles depend on the relationship between concrete and abstract nouns or noun phrases and the processes in which they are embedded. The following working hypothesis has been formulated: English and Lithuanian do not essentially differ with respect to the personified semantic roles of the words tree and medis. The corpus citations are taken from the British National Corpus and the writings of English authors to represent the English part as well as DONELAITIS Corpus compiled by the Computational Linguistics Centre in Kaunas Vytautas Magnus University. The research was carried out within the framework of contrastive and componential analysis methods. The sentence is a means of communication. The content of communication is a situation. The situation does not refer directly to an extralinguistic reality, but rather to the speaker’s conceptualization of it. The components of this conceptualization of reality are semantic functions, or roles: processes, participants, circumstances. Of all the components of a situation, the most important is the Process. In the present study, the following processes have been discussed: material, mental and verbal. These processes determine whether the words tree and medis are assigned to the personified semantic roles. To sum up, the comparative analysis of the words tree in English and medis in Lithuanian revealed that personified semantic roles are associated with Agent, Patient, Senser, and Sayer. |
