Existential sentences in the world's languages tend to develop specific morphological, syntactic, and lexical properties. The present work offers a contrastive functional analysis of these constructions in two typologically unrelated languages, English and Lithuanian. The study focuses on the relationship between the syntactic structure of different existential sentence types and their meaning; it also explores the semantic and pragmatic parameters relevant to the structural differences within a single language and across the two compared languages. Most importantly, a new definition of the existential sentence, which takes into account both semantic and syntactic criteria, is proposed for Lithuanian. The findings are drawn on the basis of the corpus and highlight conspicuous differences in the linguistic representations of the construction in the two languages. With respect to Lithuanian, communicative word order variations, language-specific structures (the BKI and the impersonal passive), and a wider use of lexical verbs present an area of special interest. Contents: The English existential: definition and classification -- General characteristics: structural patterns -- Semantic types -- Word order -- The interpretation of there -- Verbs in the construction -- The definiteness restriction -- Lithuanian existentials: the semantics of the basic sentence patterns -- Types of 'be' existentials -- Communicative types of existential sentences -- Semantic classes of acceptable lexical verbs -- Definite and indefinite subject NPs -- Language-specific existential structures.

This collection of papers offers diverse yet highly professional accounts of multiple cross-linguistic and cross-cultural aspects of English studies in Lithuania. It is valuable for the wide variety of empirical data presented, for the insights into both English and Lithuanian, which, when studied individually, sometimes cannot escape a narrower treatment. Most of the essays in this volume deal with semantics, pragmatics and grammar, while others focus on phonetics and language pedagogy. The collection is also notable for its use of various different methodologies, including triple CL – corpus linguistic, cognitive linguistic and contrastive linguistic – principles of investigation. A particular strength of the book is its focus on the contrastive aspect of study. Further, many of the contributions included here have profound implications for both translation and teaching.

This book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of the Baltic languages (Lithuanian, Latvian and Latgalian), which have only marginally featured in the discourse of theoretical linguistics and linguistic typology. The aim of the book is to bridge the gap between the study of the Baltic languages, on the one hand, and the current agenda of the theoretical and typological approaches to language, on the other. The book comprises 13 articles dealing with various aspects of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicon, and their interactions, plus a lengthy introduction, whose aim is to outline the state of the art in the research on the Baltic languages. The contributions are data-driven, being based on field-work, corpus research, and data published in the sources not accessible to the general linguistic audience. On the other hand, all contributions are informed in the relevant contemporary linguistic theories and in the advances of linguistic typology. Some of the contributions aim at a more detailed, accurate and theoretically informed description of the data, others look at the Baltic material from a more theoretical point of view, still others assume an areal-typological or contact perspective.

The ten contributions to this volume present original research on grammar and discourse in modern Lithuanian and Latvian. They reflect the diversity of approaches in linguistic research on Baltic languages that has developed in recent years, after a period where these languages were studied almost exclusively from the perspective of historical-comparative linguistics. Current research perspectives include, among others, perspectives from discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, language acquisition research, corpus linguistics, contrastive studies, and linguistic typology. The studies in this volume explore new ways of describing the system and use of Latvian or Lithuanian from a synchronic, non-normative point of view. They focus on grammatical categories and constructions (modality, evidentiality, case, existential clauses), grammatical characteristics of lexical classes (reflexive verbs, numerals), the characteristics of certain forms of discourse (academic discourse, food discourse), and the effects of an ideology of “correct language” on language users.

Contrastive Linguistics is an expanding field, as witnessed by the publication in recent years of an increasing number of monographs, collected volumes and journal articles. The present volume, which comprises an introduction and ten chapters dealing with lexical contrasts between English and other languages, shows advances within the well-established lexical work in the field. Each of the chapters takes lexical items as its starting point and compares English with one or more languages. The languages represented are Spanish, Lithuanian, Swedish, German, Norwegian and Czech. Furthermore, they emphasise the link between lexis and grammar, not only within the same language, but also across languages. Finally, several studies represent one of the more recent developments of contrastive linguistics, namely a growing focus on genre and register comparisons. The book should appeal to both established scholars and advanced students with an interest in lexis, genre, corpus linguistics and/or contrastive linguistics.

This is the first of three volumes dealing with clausal architecture, grammatical relations, case-marking and the syntax–semantics interface in Baltic. It focuses on the grammatical relations of subject and object and the viability of these notions in languages like Lithuanian and Latvian, which have a rich case morphology and show many deviations from the canonical nominative-accusative pattern of case-marking. The issues examined include differential object marking, subjecthood in specificational copular constructions, ‘swarm’-type alternations and what they tell us about grammatical relations, special types of subject and object marking in non-finite clauses, and non-canonical grammatical relations induced by modal predicates. One study provides a comparative outlook towards Icelandic, another language noted for its complex marking of grammatical relations. The articles in the volume represent various theoretical frameworks.

The languages of Europe and North and Central Asia provide a rich variety of data. In this volume, some articles are summaries of large areal typological research projects, and some articles focus on structures or constructions in a single language. However, it is common to all the articles that they investigate phenomena that have not been examined previously, or they apply a new framework to a topic. The volume will be of interest to scholars with a focus on this broad geographic region, typologists, historical linguists and discourse analysts. The uniqueness of this volume is that it brings together work on a genetically diverse set of languages that have some shared areal traits.