Oppositions and their Neutralisation in the Paradigms of Grammatical Categories Cover Image

Opozicijos ir jų neutralizacija gramatinių kategorijų paradigmose
Oppositions and their Neutralisation in the Paradigms of Grammatical Categories

Author(s): Aldona Paulauskienė
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Kauno Technologijos Universitetas
Keywords: gramatinė kategorija; paradigma; opozicija; neutralizacija; sinonimika; asmuo; linksnis; giminė; rūšis; veikslas

Summary/Abstract: On the basis of the principle of opposition, five grammatical categories – person of verbs, case of nouns, gender of coordinating words, voice and aspect of verbs – are analysed in the article. The morphological paradigm of the category of person has been formed on universal semantic and syntactic basis. There is a binary opposition in the trinomial category of person. It means that the first and the second persons form the opposition with the third person. The oppositional analysis shows that the Lithuanian vocative belongs to the paradigm of case. Meanwhile, non-coordinating forms of adjectives do not belong to the paradigm of gender. They correlate with adverbs. Oppositions of active and passive participles are neutralised in both the attributive and predicative positions in a sentence. Neutralisation in the attributive position results in the adjectival participle with features of a noun (siuvamoji mašina, miegamasis kambarys). Neutralisation in the predicative position turns passive forms into synonymous active forms (Čia kiškis tupėjo; Čia kiškis tupėjęs; Čia kiškio tupėta). Research of aspects shows that means of composition in Lithuanian allow expressing what is rendered by inflectional processes in other languages.

  • Issue Year: 2008
  • Issue No: 13
  • Page Range: 5-14
  • Page Count: 10
  • Language: Lithuanian