The aim of the present article is to examine the relationship between the process of language acquisition and gender. It analyzes a longitudinal corpus of one girl, Rūta, covering the period from 1;7 to 2;6. The corpus consists of 35 hours of recordings. The recorded speech is transcribed according to the requirements of CHILDES (MacWhinney, Snow 1990). A special attention in the article is paid to testing the hypothesis which was supported by empirical evidence from other languages to the effect that the unmarked member, i.e. nouns of masculine gender, is acquired earlier than the marked member of the opposition (i.e. feminine nouns)

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The article is devoted to the analysis of a specific syntactic structure in Lithuanian, the BKI construction. This type of sentence is also attested in Russian, where it has got a wide coverage.The BKI construction in Lithuanian is made up of the following elements: (i) a form of the existential verb būti 'be', (ii) the k-word, and (iii) the infinitive. The type is attested both in positive and negative forms. The peculiarity of the construction has been noted by a number of Lithuanian scholars, however, no link has been recognized between the semantic content of the sentence, the existential verb būti 'be', and the syntactic structure of the construction. The data used for the analysis (2,000 entries) are taken from Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos tekstynas at http://donelaitis.vdu.lt.In the article the author offers a new approach to the analysis of the BKI construction and claims that it represents a language-specific existential structure. Evidence is presented to the effect that the BKI construction in Lithuanian is a syntactic synonym of the existential type 'proper'. Introductory remarksThe existential construction in English and Lithu anian of the type There is someone in the garden / Ant tėvų trobos yra žaibolaidis and There are no ghosts / … iš tiesų yra vaiduoklių … has many common features. This, first and foremost, concerns the semantic types of ESs, which, in turn, depend on the meanings of the verb be/būti.The values of the verb be/būti in English and Lithuanian (see The Oxford English Dictionary 1989, 1-5; LKŽ 1968, 1213-6 and Sližienė 1994 can be grouped as representing two central meanings which lie at the heart of all semantic types and the corresponding syntactic structures of the ES in the two languages. The first value is expressed in the absolute use of 'be' in the meaning of exist, be alive, be in the world of fact:

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