| Abstract [eng] |
Within the theoretical framework of Hallidayan Functional Grammar (1994), an attempt is made to analyze the words market and turgus in English and Lithuanian, i.e. what semantic functions (roles) they perform in the deep structure of a sentence (clause). Semantic roles are assigned to nouns and NPs according to the relation they hold with the verb. Despite detailed studies on the semantic diversity of syntactic roles, there are very few substantial empirical studies that have taken up the contrastive investigations in cross-linguistic perspective. Thus the aim of the present study is to describe and contrast semantic functions of the words market in English and turgus in Lithuanian. This study considers the mapping of semantic functions to syntactic functions in English and Lithuanian. The following working hypothesis has been formed: English and Lithuanian do not essentially differ with respect to the scope of semantic functions of the words market and turgus. The corpus citations are taken from the two largest general reference corpora available in the languages under study, namely the British National Corpus and DONELAITIS compiled by the Computational Linguistics Centre in Kaunas Vytautas Magnus University. The study is contrastive, thus the research was carried out within the framework of the contrastive method. Similar to all lexical elements (i.e. words), the proposition can be viewed as consisting of semantic elements, or components, such as Processes, Participants and Circumstances. Thus the use of the method of componential analysis made it possible to establish the meaning of the proposition, which is constituted by respective semantic elements. [...]. |
