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The idea of this paper arose in a reading group of several colleagues at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University after a discussion of a review article published by the editors of Language Teaching. Titled ‘Replication studies in language learning and teaching’ (2008), the paper focuses on replication studies and argues that they should be promoted and valued no less than original research. The participants of the reading group agreed that replication studies, understood here primarily as replications of quantitative research, are indeed an important issue that could be of interest to the broader community of applied linguists in Lithuania. The present paper argues that attempts to replicate earlier studies, which are very scarce or non-existent in Lithuania, deserve more attention both from novice and mature researchers. Replications are particularly valuable in developmental studies where replicating a study over a period of time allows the researcher to obtain data for continued analysis. Furthermore, a replication of a published study that deals with data collected in one country offers an opportunity to verify its findings in a different context and this way consolidates our understanding of phenomena under study. Finally, replication is an invaluable learning method to a novice linguist, be it a senior undergraduate or postgraduate student. Thus the authors of this paper would like to promote the idea of replication research in our community as well as encourage everyone interested make use of the increasingly growing amount of open access data available on the internet.

Humour is part of human communication and can serve as an effective means for making contact, finding a way out of an embarrassing situation, or mitigating different political and social tensions. However, not all humans are born capable of generating and processing humour and it remains an open question whether it is possible to learn and develop this ability. Therefore, a sense of humour, but not an *ability of humour, would be a frequent collocation in many languages. Cognitive linguists claim that collocations are not accidental as combinability patterns point to certain conceptualisation processes in the expression of meaning. The cognitive linguistic viewpoint that humour is based on a mismatch, or incongruity, between ideas, otherwise referred to as frame shifting, is adopted as a prerequisite for producing humour in this paper.The focus of this paper is the expression of verbal humour dealing with the introduction of the euro in Lithuania in 2015. Verbal humour is created by employing different linguistic resources: sounds, spelling, word building models, homonymy and polysemy, word combinations and other syntactic structures and larger chunks of texts or discourse. The investigation is based on the main theories of humour: the Semantic Script Theory and the Superiority Theory developed by Attardo (1994) and Raskin (1985). The empirical material consists of 89 cases of verbal humour found in posts and comments in personal profiles and pages on Facebook and in reader comments following different articles in popular news portals written from September 2014 to February 2015. The paper attempts to describe linguistic means contributing to the construction of humour as well as to identify the shifts between frames involved in generating the humorous effect. The results of the investigation suggest that most humorous comments bear content-related political implications, shifting between the frames of the loss of national currency perceived either as the loss of stability or as the loss of national identity and the frame of positive expectations due to the greater integration into the EU. The techniques used to construct humour include wordplay based on sound combinations, similar spelling, non-standard spelling, and code-switching involving English and Russian. An especially productive technique was the construction of existing or non-existing words by code-mixing and the use of metaphor and metonymy. Larger chunks of text also employ intertextuality, parody, switching between registers and different types of echoing.

On 6 May, Professor Björn Wiemer from the Institute of Slavonic Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz gave a public lecture on Evidentiality as a Conceptual Domain: defining the functions and linguistic expressions to the participants of the project and the faculty and students of the University of Vilnius. The professor's opening statement was concerned with the importance and necessity to try keeping the distinction between the conceptual domain of evidentiality and epistemic modality as clear-cut as possible despite the fact that many scholars claim about an overlap between the two domains. However, he also admitted that there existed many cases of ambiguity and it was not always easy to distinguish between evidentials and epistemic modals due to the fact that both meanings (especially reported and inferential) could be often intertwined in one lexical expression. In his lecture, Professor Wiemer provided numerous examples in Lithuanian and many other languages in Europe illustrating various cases of morphological and lexical coding of hearsay and inference, which helped to define the domain of evidentiality as well as evoked questions and comments from the audience.On the third day, the participants of the project made presentations on the evidentiality in the two Baltic languages. Professor Wiemer presented a study of parenthetical hearsay markers deriving from SaY-verbs in Croatian. Those hearsay markers were retrieved using the following criteria: retrievable (historically and/or synchronically) to SaY-verb; still refers to previously uttered speech acts; author of the original speech act not retrievable; not integrated into clausal syntax. The participants discussed the research methodology used in this study and possible ways of clarifying some ambiguous examples.