Prie didaktinės prozos ir publicistikos versmių

Abstract

The article deals with the changes of an attribute phrase in Lithuanian texts. First, attribute phrases with the agreeing and non-agreeing component was investigated in the texts which come from the middle of the 19th century. Next, the results of the analysis were compared with the texts of social and political journalism from the end of the 19th century. The comparison yielded important results which come down to the following. The use of the genitive case in postposition decreases significantly and almost all dependent components are preposed, that is, take the position before the noun. The tradition of word order variation in the attribute phrase, which has existed for almost three hundred years, is abandoned; in addition, the position of the noun in the genitive case has radically changed. This new tendency influenced not only the syntactic structure of the language, but it also destroyed the earlier intonation pattern of the sentence. In Lithuanian, the position of the pronoun with regard to the noun is not restricted and this enables the speakers to change the intonation of the sentence according to pragmatic factors. These include, first and foremost, a constant alteration of enclitics and accented words in order to separate the clusters of several informative words in a phrase. Fixed word order decreased such opportunities. As a result, standard Lithuanian shows excessive marking, that is, the relations between words in the attribute phrase are expressed not only by means of case, but also by word order. Sometimes this enables us to avoid ambiguity, but several modifiers before the noun can result just in that. Due to the fixed word order in the attribute phrase not only certain nuances of meaning, but also intonation variations of the sentence were lost.