Įterpiniai, jų aiškinimas Jono Jablonskio gramatikos darbuose

GINTAUTAS AKELAITIS Mykolas Romeris University PARENTHETICALS AND THEIR TREATMENT IN JONAS JABLONSKIS'S GRAMMATICAL WORKS INTRODUCTION Parentheticals are a peripheral subject in the syntax of Lithuanian sentences and in descriptions of that syntax. Yet without discussing them, a description of sentence syntax would be not only incomplete but also unfinished. It does not matter at all what they are called or how they are assessed: whether traditionally as parentheticals, or by terms and concepts suited to German and English, whose formal expression of relations among sentence constituents differs from that of Lithuanian, such as Satzadverbiale, Sentence adverbs – sentence adverbs (see Holvoet, Pajėdienė 2005: 107 et seq.), or by the term parentete, inherited from classical rhetoric (see Koženiauskienė 2001: 176 et seq.; Rulíková 1973). It is now clear that parentheticals, since they do not belong to the core of the sentence, are assigned to the sentence-as-utterance level and occur within various ranks of the sentence and even of the text—they are a means of forming modality and elements expressing the discursiveness of the sentence, and in a text they also serve as a means of sentence cohesion, that is, grammatical connectedness. To understand what the description of parentheticals in Jonas Jablonskis's grammatical works was like and what significance it had, we need at least a concise overview of the history of Lithuanian syntax studies—what had been said about parentheticals before J. Jablonskis. 1. Lithuanian grammars before J. Jablonskis contained no description of parentheticals. In grammars written in languages other than Lithuanian—not even in those of August Schleicher or Fridrich Kuršaitis—was there much description of the sentence itself; matters of syntax were set out according to the so-called parts-of-speech syntax principle (cf. Būda 1987: 13 et seq.). But the first examples, now regarded as parentheticals, had already appeared. For example, discussing the preposition anot, used only in parenthetical constructions, A. Schleicher wrote: “the meaning of anot is unclear to me; it G. AKELAITIS. Įterpiniai, jų aiškinimas Jono Jablonskio gramatikos darbuose 57 (i.e., anot. – G. A.) is used in such expressions as: anot tevo, anot jo žodzo” (Schleicher 1856: 280). 2. In descriptions of grammar published in Lithuanian—those of Antanas Baranauskas (1896), Petras Gražbylys (Povilas Januševičius) (1905), and Adomas Stuobris (1906)—although parentheticals are not described, the sections on punctuation introduce the first terms denoting what is now called parentheticals. Specifically: words inserted parenthetically, sentences inserted parenthetically (A. Baranauskas); words inserted, sentences interjected (Gražbylys-Januševičius); inserted words and sentences (Adomas Stuobris). These terms, with their expressive agreeing modifiers, neither endured for long nor did any of them become established. Thus priority for both the established terminology and the description of parentheticals as units of sentence syntax belongs to Jonas Jablonskis. THE PRESENTATION OF PARENTHETICAL ELEMENTS IN JONAS JABLONSKIS’ GRAMMATICAL WORKS Of Jonas Jablonskis’ grammatical works (i.e., textbooks), parenthetical elements are, understandably, described most fully in the 1911 Lietuvių kalbos sintaksėje. The 1901 Lietuviškos kalbos gramatikoje, whose history of composition and publication is well known throughout Lithuanian linguistics, contains no information about parenthetical elements: they did not appear as a subject of description in the chapter “A Few Rules of Syntax” (see Jablonskis 1957: 158–177), because that chapter did not aim to provide a systematic, even if brief, description of Lithuanian syntax, but rather sought to touch on “only the most important questions of grammar,” moreover, proceeding not from the principles of Jablonskis’ grammar, but from those of earlier language grammars. Although there is a chapter entitled “A Few Words about Grammatical Orthography,” punctuation is not even mentioned—which means that parenthetical elements could not have entered the 1901 grammar by this route either. (Even in the Lietuvių kalbos sintaksėje (p. 102), J. Jablonskis stated: “Punctuation marks and their study, strictly speaking, belong not so much to syntax as to orthography”—thus emphasizing that orthography and punctuation constitute a unity of knowledge about the written expression of language.) In the course of the study, what J. Jablonskis wrote about parenthetical elements in the chapters on “Elementary Matters of Syntax” and in the descriptions of punctuation, found in the 1922 (and 1919) Lietuvių kalbos gramatikoje and the 1925 Lietuvių kalbos vadovėlyje, was compared with the corresponding material in the 1911 Lietuvių kalbos sintaksės. The conclusion was that, both in the grammar and in the textbook, 58 KALBOS KULTŪRA | 83 J. Jablonskis presented what he considered the most important points about parenthetical elements, drawing on the Lietuvių kalbos sintaksės. One minor detail: in his 1922 and 1925 grammatical works he no longer used the prefix in- in the terms interptinis, interptiniai—he now rendered those elements with the prefix į- (see Jablonskis 1957: 412–413). Thus, the subject of the following analysis is what J. Jablonskis wrote about parenthetical elements in the 1911 Lietuvių kalbos sintaksėje. TERMS, CLASSIFICATION, AND THE PLACE OF PARENTHETICAL ELEMENTS IN THE DESCRIPTION OF SYNTAX J. Jablonskis did not use the single-word term įterpiniai—as already mentioned, he used compound terms with the agreeing element įterptinis. The term he emphasized most was įterptiniai sakiniai. From his explanation that “there are not only parenthetical sentences, but also parenthetical separate utterances and words” (Lietuvių kalbos sintaksė, p. 76; hereafter abbreviated S 1911), one can clearly infer the terms įterptiniai žodžiai ir įterptiniai pasakymai. These terms have a classificatory function. The classification of parenthetical phenomena is in fact binary: 1) parenthetical sentences, 2) parenthetical utterances and words. J. Jablonskis’ grouping of the two kinds of parenthetical elements in the second category as a single unit shows that he sensed that parenthetical utterances, which according to current interpretation are considered fossilized, are close to parenthetical words. A distinctive feature is how J. Jablonskis incorporated parenthetical elements into his description of syntax. He assigned them a very important, albeit formal, status: alongside sentence coordination, subordination, and juxtaposition (today: sentences with homogeneous constituents), he placed sentence parenthesis. This means that, in the linguist’s view, a sentence with a parenthetical element is a complex sentence. He stated this explicitly: “In a complex sentence we distinguish: 1) subordination of sentences, 2) coordination of sentences, 3) juxtaposition of sentences, and 4) parenthesis of sentences.” (S 1911: 87). On the other hand, however, in the description of syntax itself, parenthetical elements are not in the chapter “Sentence Construction,” that is, the description of grammatical sentence types, but are discussed in detail in the chapter “Other Peculiarities of Sentences and Their Variety.” They are discussed first; only after them come direct speech, its variants recalled sentences and narration, or indirect speech, known as participial speech. Thus, one may cautiously argue that J. Jablonskis sensed parenthetical elements to be both an aspect of the simple sentence—or of the sentence as a unit of language in general—and an ancillary matter. G. AKELAITIS. Įterpiniai, jų aiškinimas Jono Jablonskio gramatikos darbuose 59 THE CONCEPT OF PARENTHETICALS It is evident from the description (which can hardly be called a definition) that J. Jablonskis understood parentheticals very broadly and somewhat inconsistently. The description depended considerably on the fact that, in using the term, he first and foremost emphasized that parentheticals were sentences, and regarded sentences containing parentheticals as complex, as noted above. “An independent sentence which, when inserted into another, has no grammatical connection with it (i.e., no grammatical relation. – G. A.) and introduces some clarification, qualification, or restriction of thought into the utterance as a whole is called an inserted sentence” – this is how J. Jablonskis described (or, well, defined) parentheticals. He immediately added, however, that “utterances and individual words are also inserted” (S 1911: 76). He offered no explanation for this inconsistency between the statements. As he himself said, he relied on the “ordinary syntax textbooks” of the time. Russian linguists, for example, Dimitrijus Ovsianiko-Kulikovskis and, later, Aleksandras Peškovskis, pointed out that inserted words and expressions were elements of either an incomplete sentence or an abbreviated sentence. Thus, to put it cautiously, J. Jablonskis’s principal description of parentheticals seems somewhat contradictory. J. Jablonskis indicated that parentheticals are, in today’s terms, merely incidental: they do not express elements of the content conveyed by the sentence. The linguist writes about this: “An inserted sentence can sometimes be omitted altogether, and this omission does not in the least alter the meaning of the syntactic whole. The utterance ‘Tu, sako, vakar mieste buvęs’ means the same as the sentence ‘Tu vakar mieste buvęs.’” (S 1911: 78). Of course, in such an example, accompanied by the explanatory word “sometimes,” the parenthetical sako (“they say”) duplicates, in J. Jablonskis’s terminology, dalyvų kalbą (“reported speech”). But he did not undertake to explain how parentheticals modify a sentence’s content and meaning. Viewed from the perspective of contemporary descriptions of Lithuanian syntax, J. Jablonskis presented a distinctive, broad conception of parentheticals. The breadth of his conception of parentheticals and of the scope of parentheticals as concrete syntactic elements of a sentence was determined by the fact that, when J. Jablonskis was writing his grammatical works, the formalist approach to grammar had taken hold (although he remained faithful to the logical approach to grammar). For this reason, grammarians paid little attention to the semantics of linguistic phenomena. This tendency is also evident in J. Jablonskis’s grammatical works. Accordingly, he described the semantics, or meanings, of parentheticals— as the description cited above shows—in very general and approximate terms: “introduces some clarification, qualification, or restriction of thought into the utterance as a whole.” Moreover, this description— 60 KALBOS KULTŪRA | 83 does not reflect the meanings of the most characteristic Lithuanian parentheticals that J. Jablonskis listed first—sako, girdi, vadinas, rodos, regis, žiūrėk, matyti, anot (ko nors) and so on. Compare the examples he gives (S 1911: 76–78) with these most characteristic Lithuanian parentheticals: “Dabar eikit⟧,” sako, “namo,” “paskui,” girdi, “surasim, kas čia kaltas.” Tu, regis, nebuvai tą dieną nė iš namų išvažiavęs. Priėjo višta, kiaulė arba koks galvijas – žvirbliui nė motais, lesa sau gretymais su jais ir dar, žiūrėk, ant nugaros atsistos. Tu nieko, matyti, iš to nelaimėsi. Tuomet ir žmonių, matai, nedaug buvę. Reikėjo „pačiupinėti“, anot motynos, ir nebebūtų lindęs. Reikėtų jam, vienu žodžiu, galas padaryti and so on. Unlike later works on Lithuanian syntax, J. Jablonskis did not even attempt to classify parentheticals or discuss them in any way according to their meanings. Among the grammatical features of parentheticals, another important point is that J. Jablonskis noted their freedom to occupy three positions: “Inserted sentences can often stand at the end or the beginning of other sentences, not only in the middle.” (S 1911: 78). Thus, medial position is the most characteristic position for parentheticals. But, like many later syntacticians, including contemporary ones, he did not explain what determines the position of parentheticals or what it depends on. DISTINCTIVE PARENTHETICALS The very general description of the meanings of parentheticals, combined with a failure to recognize fully the lexicalization of words, expressions, and even sentences functioning as parentheticals, allowed J. Jablonskis to group with parentheticals constructions that did not fit into other groups of syntactic phenomena and were related to parentheticals only in that, in written sentences, they are set off by punctuation marks and, in spoken language, evidently by more or less pronounced pauses. This is why constructions with be (“besides,” “apart from”) came to be included among parentheticals: Buvo septyni vyrai, be Petro. Be šių išrodymų, buvo daugybė ir kitų, dar didesnių. Lietuvoje, be lietuvių, gyvena dar lenkų, rusų (baltųjų ir didžiųjų), žydų, vokiečių, nemaža latvių... (S 1911: 78). Incidentally, even in contemporary descriptions of syntax, especially punctuation, constructions of this kind are still classified as parentheticals, primarily because they resemble the genuine parenthetical be to (“moreover”). On the other hand, J. Jablonskis himself was also uncertain about constructions of the aforementioned kind with be: in the chapter “Punctuation Marks,” in the sentence Kitų švenčių, be sekmadienių, anglai beveik neturi, he treated the construction be sekmadienių as an appositive (see S 1911: 97). G. AKELAITIS. Įterpiniai, jų aiškinimas Jono Jablonskio gramatikos darbuose 61 J. Jablonskis considered the author’s words inserted into a direct-speech sentence to be parenthetical insertions: “You, mother, stay with the sick man,” said the father, “and I’ll go fetch the doctor.” “God forbid, there’s no need!—Juozapas exclaimed:—I’ll throw him into the pit, and that’s that” (S 1911: 76). He also classified as parenthetical insertions those author’s words that are not inserted into direct speech but follow it, that is, occur at the very end of the sentence: “We must wash it first,” added the old man (S 1911: 76). In scholarly works on Lithuanian syntax, J. Jablonskis’s decision to treat the author’s words as parenthetical insertions was not merely left undiscussed; it was not even mentioned. In contemporary terms, J. Jablonskis also considered completely free, non-fixed, even non-standard utterances—mostly sentence-shaped ones—inserted into a sentence to be parenthetical insertions. Yet he included not a single one among the 80 examples in his description of parenthetical insertions. Instead, he placed them in the chapter “Punctuation Marks” as constructions set off by dashes and, especially, parentheses, explicitly calling them parenthetical insertions. Here are the examples: Once—a girl was already twelve years old—the landowners began talking. If the spring is small and there is little water in it—as happens very often—then some people drink from it. The time will soon come when no German emigrant (more than a hundred thousand of them leave Germany for America each year) who intends to earn a living by farming in America will sail there from Europe without a cage containing several or a dozen sparrows. (S 1911: 100, 101). The placement of these examples shows that the linguist did not consider freely used insertive constructions to be genuine parenthetical insertions, which are rare in everyday speech and in texts written in its style. The examples given by J. Jablonskis are especially valued by all those who have studied his works; today they tell us a great deal about the linguistic phenomenon in question—that is, about what was not written in the textbook text. J. Jablonskis also gave sentences containing parenthetical insertions not only from the language of ordinary people, which he considered particularly valuable, but also from specialist literature, although he stressed that this should be done carefully; thus, indirectly, he also showed to some extent the parenthetical insertions characteristic of specialized language. Compare, for example: The life of the society’s lodgers, as you may have noticed, was quite understandable to us. Their translations I, as I said, corrected and compared. Compare also individual parenthetical insertions: in fact, most importantly, for example, in the opinion of historians (see S 1911: 77–79). He tried to present different inflected forms of the same word when used parenthetically, as well as expressions containing that word, side by side, e.g.: says, says Jurgis; recounts, recount the old people and so on. From the examples J. Jablonskis gave, we can infer a little about changes in parenthetical insertions, although nearly a century of language development reveals very little. Here 62 KALBOS KULTŪRA | 83 today we have only perhaps, probably, whereas in J. Jablonskis’s time there were even variants used parenthetically: 1) may be, must be; 2) may be, must be; 3) may be, must be and 4) may be, must be—the latter, in contrast to the first three variants, were perceived as two-word forms. Compare, for example: Also, there may be (there must be) a lot of guests arriving. J. Jablonskis recorded the prepositional form anote, now known only from the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language: “What will that ‘scoundrel,’ anote father, do to me!” (S 1911: 77). For a long time, J. Jablonskis’s definition of parenthetical insertions and examples from the extensive material he presented (80 sentences containing parenthetical insertions) were transferred, either in full or with only minor changes, into the numerous Lithuanian syntax textbooks written for schools at the time. * Two distinct scholarly conceptions of parenthetical insertions in contemporary Lithuanian are evidently also based on J. Jablonskis’s description. One is the narrow conception, set out in academic descriptions of Lithuanian syntax (LKG III 1976: 701–713; DLKG 1997: 641–644), in which parenthetical insertions are fixed, conventional words and expressions with a defined range of meanings; free insertive constructions, which are “a non-systemic phenomenon of the speech plane” (DLKG 1997: 645), are called interpolations (the author’s studies of parenthetical insertions in this article are also based on this conception). J. Jablonskis evidently leaned toward the narrow conception of parenthetical insertions, but, attentive to syntactic material, he also provided examples of such insertions that to a greater or lesser extent allowed the broader conception to take shape. Its main distinguishing feature is not so much that interpolations are not distinguished from parenthetical insertions, but rather that it also recognizes parenthetical insertions that are grammatically connected to sentence words (see Balkevičius 1963: 267–281; Labutis 2002: 343–353). CONCLUSIONS 1. Jonas Jablonskis discussed parenthetical insertions repeatedly in his grammatical works (1911, 1919 and 1922, 1925), and most fully in a special chapter of his 1911 Syntax of the Lithuanian Language; the chapter “Punctuation Marks” in this publication contains some additional information about parenthetical insertions. When incorporating abridged versions of his description of parenthetical insertions into later grammatical works, the linguist changed neither his conception of parenthetical insertions nor the illustrative material in the slightest. G. AKELAITIS. Įterpiniai, jų aiškinimas Jono Jablonskio gramatikos darbuose 63 2. J. Jablonskis equated parentheticals with the predicative constituents of a compound sentence (the current term); he considered sentences containing parentheticals to be compound, although he discussed the parentheticals themselves as a distinctive feature of sentences and as varied in form. He also characterized parentheticals themselves as sentences (i.e., predicative constituents of compound sentences). 3. In addition to their sentence-like form, J. Jablonskis also identified another form of parentheticals: utterances and separate words. In characterizing parentheticals, he highlighted the following distinguishing grammatical features: the absence of a grammatical link (i.e., a grammatical relation) with other words in the sentence, three possible positions within the sentence, and the possibility of omitting parentheticals from the sentence (their peripheral status). The very limited attention paid to the meanings of parentheticals provided a basis for including, alongside the predominant characteristic group of Lithuanian parentheticals, sentence elements that, like parentheticals, are marked off by intonation and punctuation (a feature J. Jablonskis did not explicitly identify). 4. Through the range and number of examples, and the way they were presented, J. Jablonskis brought into focus the core of the Lithuanian parenthetical inventory, on which the current narrow conception of parentheticals is also based. By grouping with parentheticals various constructions bearing some mark of insertion, the linguist laid the groundwork for developing a broad conception of parentheticals. LITERATŪRA Balkevičius J. 1963: Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos sintaksė, Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla. Būda V. 1987: Lietuvių kalbos prijungiamieji sakiniai: tyrimo istorija, Vilnius: Moks las. DLKG 1997: Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos gramatika. Red. V. Ambrazas. 3-iasis patais. leid., Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas. Holvoet A., Pajėdienė J. 2005: Aplinkybės ir jų tipai. – Lietuvių kalbos gramatikos darbai 3. Gramatinių funkcijų tyrimai. Red. R. Mikulskas, Vilnius: Lietuvių kalbos institutas. Jablonskis J. 1957: Rinktiniai raštai. Sud. J. Palionis, Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla. Koženiauskienė R. 2001: Retorika: iškalbos stilistika. 2-asis patais. leid., Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas. Labutis V. 2002: Lietuvių kalbos sintaksė. 3-iasis patais. leid., Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla. LKG III 1976: Lietuvių kalbos gramatika 3. Sintaksė. Vyr. red. K. Ulvydas, Vilnius: Mokslas. 64 KALBOS KULTŪRA | 83 S 1911: Rygiškių Jono Lietuvių kalbos sintaksė 1, Seinai: Laukaičio, Dvaranausko, Narjausko ir B-vės spaustuvė. Rulíková B. 1973: Parenteze v současné češtinč, Praha: Academia. Schleicher A. 1856: Handbuch der litauischen Sprache von August Schleicher. Bd. 1. Grammatik, Prag: Clave. Gauta 2010 11 03 INSERTS AND THEIR TREATMENT IN JONAS JABLONSKIS’ GRAMMARS S u m m a r y The creator of Standard Lithuanian, Jonas Jablonskis, was also a grammarian who wrote several grammar books that became widely used and that had a major impact on the work of future textbook authors and linguists. The article analyzes one grammatical (syntactical) topic, namely, the treatment of inserts by J. Jablonskis. The study of J. Jablonskis articles revealed several issues. There had been no descriptions of inserts in pre-Jablonskis grammars though some sources had proposed various Lithuanian terms for the insert. These terms, however, were not broadly accepted. Thus the authorship of the term įterpinys should be ascribed to J. Jablonskis who was also the first to define the term and explain the principles of its establishment. His definition includes such features of the insert that do occur in more recent explanations, namely, the absence of grammatical relation to the other words of the sentence, a free placement in the sentence, secondary importance to the basic meaning of the sentence. J. Jablonskis paid little attention to the semantics of inserts and he treated as inserts such constructions that only had a formal intonational and punctuational feature. Some of these aspects gave rise to the tradition of narrow and broad treatment of inserts in the Lithuanian syntax. An interesting yet linguistically unfruitful was J. Jablonskis’ understanding of the insert: he treated inserts as sentences, and a sentence with an insert, in his view, was a complex sentence. GINTAUTAS AKELAITIS Mykolo Romerio universitetas Ateities g. 20, LT–08303 Vilnius [email protected] G. AKELAITIS. Įterpiniai, jų aiškinimas Jono Jablonskio gramatikos darbuose 65