This study examines the linguistic features of storytelling and story retelling among Lithuanian-speaking children aged 4–6 years. Using the MAIN methodology, data were collected from both storytelling based on picture sequences and retellings of two narratives (‘Dog’ and ‘Baby Birds’). The analysis focused on quantitative measures of narrative microstructure: total number of words, communication units, mean length of utterance, number of different words, and lexical diversity. The results show that narrative structure and linguistic complexity develop with age and are strongly influenced by task type. In the ‘Dog’ narratives, both storytelling and retelling featured fewer but longer and more complex utterances as children grew older. In contrast, the storytelling based on the ‘Baby Birds’ picture sequence involved an increase in communication units but a decrease in mean utterance length, reflecting a preference for simpler clause structures. The retellings of ‘Baby Birds’ demonstrated increased narrative elaboration, as shown by higher numbers of communication units. The analysis of lexical diversity revealed minor overall differences between storytelling and retelling tasks. The analysis showed that verb lexical diversity was highest and most consistent across both storytelling and retelling tasks, highlighting the event-driven nature of the narratives. Noun lexical diversity was slightly higher in retellings, as children reproduced a broader range of less frequent nouns introduced in the stories. While adjective lexical diversity was similar across tasks, retellings included adjectives from a wider array of semantic categories, reflecting more input-based repetition. Overall, the findings suggest that retelling tasks elicit more linguistically advanced narratives than spontaneous storytelling, offering insights into children’s receptive and productive language abilities. These results underscore the value of retelling tasks for assessing narrative and linguistic development, especially in research involving children with language difficulties.
Metaphors are known to express people’s feelings, especially complex ones, and they shape our understanding of the world (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Kövecses 2010). Songs that can be analysed like poetry (Randel 2014; Abrams 2012) regard one of the most complicated human feelings (Maestre 2015; Lomas 2018). The study analyses love-related metaphors in Swift’s and Del Rey’s lyrics, considering creative metaphors and the prevailing metaphorical scenarios. The results reveal that the conceptualisation of love differs across both artists. Metaphorical scenarios prevail in Swift’s lyrics and are less frequent in Del Rey’s. When constructing scenarios, Del Rey employs one-shot creative metaphors, and Swift uses a balanced mix. While the relationship itself is mostly understood as a game, the process of the relationship is conceptualised as a vehicle that takes the passengers/lovers from point A to point B, and the end of the relationship is conceptualised as death, which hints at emotional turmoil.
Code-switching, the alternation between two or more languages within a single communicative act, has been widely investigated since the 1970s. In the 21st century, with technological advancements and globalisation, scholars have increasingly examined code-switching on social networking platforms. This paper investigates code-switching in the Instagram captions of four most-followed native Lithuanian influencers’ accounts using a mixed-methods approach, offering exploratory insights into digital code-switching in Lithuania. Quantitative analysis provided the frequencies and distributions of code-switching, the languages involved, and its types and functions, while qualitative analysis applied slightly modified classification frameworks proposed by Poplack (1980) and Halim and Maros (2014). The findings suggest that code-switching occurs frequently among the four influencers, with higher overall switching frequencies observed among the male influencers in this dataset, primarily driven by one account, and with English emerging as the dominant language. Within this sample, male influencers more frequently employ hashtag switching and the function of discoverability, while female influencers more often use inter-sentential and free switching. The functional patterns further indicate that code-switching may serve as a means for these influencers to construct different identities and position themselves within broader social and cultural contexts.
This article explores one of the challenging issues in the automatic morphological analysis of the Lithuanian language: the morphological ambiguity between adverbs and prepositions. This phenomenon frequently complicates the work of automatic morphological taggers, as a single word can often be classified as different parts of speech or interpreted as various inflectional forms of the same word, leading to the selection of incorrect grammatical tags from several possible options. The aim of the study is to clarify how the distinction between adverbs and prepositions is reflected in Lithuanian grammars, dictionaries, and text corpora, and to provide recommendations for ambiguous cases.By reviewing Lithuanian dictionaries and grammars, problematic cases were identified where the distinction between adverbs and prepositions is unclear even in theory. This theoretical ambiguity further complicates the differentiation of coinciding adverbs and prepositions in practical applications. The article reveals both theoretical and practical challenges related to distinguishing between adverbs and prepositions and discusses possibilities for creating clearer rules to address this issue. The research specifically focuses on ten Lithuanian words that can function either as adverbs or prepositions: arčiau, arčiausiai, arti, iki, netoli, paraleliai, piečiau, skersai, šiauriau, už. The study examines how these words are represented in dictionaries and grammars, as well as the differences in usage frequency and contextual properties within text corpora. The findings indicate that the boundaries between adverbs and prepositions are often blurred. Dictionaries and grammars vary in their definitions and categorizations of these words, which contributes to the inconsistency in morphological tagging.Finally, the article proposes suggestions for grammatical rules to improve the accuracy of automatic recognition of adverbs and prepositions in Lithuanian. These improvements are particularly relevant for the ongoing development of Lithuanian digital language resources and tools.Overall, this work contributes to better understanding and resolving the morphological ambiguity between adverbs and prepositions in Lithuanian, paving the way for more effective computational linguistic solutions in the future.
Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is a second language (L2) teaching methodology that emphasizes the completion of authentic, real-world tasks. The role of grammar instruction within the task cycle remains a point of discussion. TBLT is often argued to primarily foster the acquisition of implicit, rather than explicit, L2 knowledge. This is considered less favorable for the teaching of morphologically complex languages such as Lithuanian, which features complex grammatical categories like case. The present paper seeks to examine these claims. Eighteen adult L2 Lithuanian learners participated in an experimental study. One group (n = 8) completed a task version with a strong focus on grammar, the other (n = 10) without. Although the results did not reveal significant treatment differences in gains in explicit case knowledge, the findings suggest differences that could divert developmental patterns related to case and paradigm selection, which may inform future task and test design.
