The present article is concerned with the verb raising parameter in Lithuanian. As is known, Pollock (1989) postulates the verb raising parameter and examines the differences betweena verb raising language like French and a verb non-raising language like English. The verb raising parameter has become an essential part of analysis within the generative syntactic framework. However, due to its rich morphological system and free word order, Lithuanian has remained virtually unexplored. The present article explores the behaviour of the Lithuanian verb in light of the test environments proposed by Pollock: the position of the verb in negative sentences, yes/no questions, relative to the so-called low adverbs, and floating quantifiers. The preliminary conclusions are further verified in agrammaticality preferencetest, with a particular focus on the placement of manner adverbs, which are regarded to stand the closest to the verb. It is shown that the verb does not raise from its base position in the affirmative sentences and may optionally raise in yes/no questions.The adverb placement relative to the verb is further specified in light of the negative particle ne-.
The article uses the theory of ontological semantics to propose methodological and practical solutions for the acquisition process of selected phrasal verbs. The Knowledge Base Acquisition Editor (KBAE) is adopted as a software for project implementation. Since in ontological semantics, each lexical unit is to be described in terms of its syntactic and semantic structure, the article provides an analysis of both components of representation. At the syntactic level, the pre-established seed templates are adjusted so as to avoid misleading interpretations and to account for causative constructions. At the semantic level, focus is placed on the application of the ontological parametric features of aspect and modality in the meaning representation of phrasal verbs. It is argued that the categories of aspect and modality help grasp the difference between the PV in question and its one-word counterpart. It is believed that the findings of the present study may have further research implications: first, an assessment of the frequency of causative constructions could help finalise the issue of Template 1, which has been found to be misleading. Second, a study of PVs conveying metaphorically extended meanings, which oftentimes turn out to be deducible, could foreground the feature of universality in languages. It could therefore be desirable to establish core PVs, the non-compositional meanings of which would pertain to the domain of cross-linguistically interpretable metaphoricity .
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