SINTAKSINIS VEIKSNIO IR TARINIO RYŠYS: SAMPRATOS KAITA
THE RELATION BETWEEN SYNTACTIC SUBJECT AND PREDICATE: CONCEPTUAL CHANGES

Summary/Abstract: The article reviews the development of the concept and classification of the relation between syntactic subject and predicate during the last seven decades in Lithuanian linguistics. This type of syntactic relations was singled out only in the Soviet period, its separation was influenced by the works of Russian syntax. Initially, its concept did not clearly distinguish between the semantic and syntactic levels of sentence analysis, it was called a predicative relationship. Later, terms more syntactic by nature (mutual dependency, interdependency) were proposed. Attempts were made to explainthis type of relations, but it failed to do this on the basis ofone criterion. Both the direction of relationand it’s morphosyntactic notation have been relied upon, often without proper distinction between these criteria. At the beginning of this century, with the rapid renewal of Lithuanian grammar theory, there was a come back to the dual division of syntactic relations based on one feature–syntactic equivalence. The term interdependency was abandoned; its cases were interpreted as subordination, marked at morphological level by the selection of caseof the argument word. The semanticrelation between the verb and its argument is also marked on the verb that is agreed in person (and number) with his argument. At the end of the article, it is shown how several examples of the relation between syntactic subject and predicate are interpreted in the Lithuanian grammar and how they couldbe interpreted on the basis of the theoretical grounds common to Western linguistics.

• Details
• Contents