Senųjų raštų atributinės konstrukcijos

Abstract

In certain cases an attribute phrase contains two or even more attributes (adjectives, pronouns, numerals, participles, genitives). The genitive attribute in Modern Lithuanian is placed directly before the head noun. Old Lithuanian demonstrates a large possibility to alternate the placement of the genitive attribute with respect to the adjective and pronoun attributes in the noun phrase. In Konstantinas Sirvydas ’’Punktai sakymų” the genitive noun follows the adjective, and the position of the genitive pronoun is not strictly determined. In Jonas Bretkūnas’ ’’Postilė” the genitive noun and the genitive pronoun precede the adjective more frequently. The genitive noun can never precede pronoun it agrees with the genitive pronoun can precede the noun in very rare cases. In case of postposition of both attributes (agreeing and genitive) with respect to the head noun the genitive pronoun is placed directly after the head noun. Attributes with respect to the head noun are usually arranged in the following way: (1) the attribute group precedes the head noun; (2) the agreeing attribute precedes the head noun and the genitive attribute follows the head noun; (3) the genitive attribute is in preposition and the agreeing attribute is in postposition with respect to the head noun; (4) attribute group follows the head noun. The first and the second cases given above are most frequent. Genitive noun being a subordinate constituent contains other attributes (agreeing and genitive). The agreeing attribute is predominantly placed before the genitive noun. But the placement of the agreeing attribute is not strictly determined if the genitive noun is postposed. The position of the genitive attributes varies with respect to the head noun. Sometimes the attribute phrase contains more than three constituents. In such a case unextended constituents precede the head noun while the constituents containing more complex structure are postposed. In more complicated structures a head noun of the postposed genitive attribute is more prominent if it occurs just before the genitive noun at the end of the phrase. And the prominence is more vivid in cases when the enclitical pronoun follows the noun or when the noun is preceded by the demonstrative pronoun. The preposed genitive can also be found in the accented position if the enclitic pronoun is uttered after it.