The paper presents a systemic approach to the typology of genres. First, it introduces the preliminaries of the theory of genre, i.e. the concepts of text, discourse and context. Genre is conceived as part and parcel of community life, its conventions and traditions, as a social action in the widest sense. As such, generic knowledge is mostly intuitive, generic conventions are perceived and reproduced on a non-verbal level. Therefore it is of paramount importance to reveal, discuss and systematise those factors which determine the existence of a generic variety as well as to explicate and verbalise intuitive generic knowledge. The object of description is textual genres analysed in terms of their function, form and contents. The overall scheme, comprising a number of notions, is based on the three Hallidayan functions of the text. Thus the ideational function represents contents of the texts, its topic and object, the rela ionship between text and context, implicatures and background knowledge as much as it influ ences the choice and comprehension of a specific genre. The interpersonal function reflects the model of the relationships between writer and its audience on the one hand, and writer and the referent on the other. Text modality, speech acts and hedging devices are just a few means that belong to the interpersonal function of a text and differentiate between different genres. The textual function comprises the widely discussed phenomenon of implicit textuality or coherence, explicit textuality or cohesion, and intertextuality or hierarchy of voices. The typological power of the textual function manifests itself in the informational structure of a text, one of the basic criterions for the identification of genre. The present analysis applied generic criteria to the study of press genres with the aim to delineate the main genres (including pre-genres and sub-genres). The threefold framework in corporating the descriptive, systemic and func tional approaches were used for the analysis of the existing classification of Lithuanian journalese. The investigation revealed the deficiency and inadequacy of the current typological classification of the press genres. The outcome of the study points to the urgent need to investigate press genres using the framework discussed above

The article deals with the distribution of one noun klausimas. It is collected and described with the help of two methods: automatic concording and traditional collection of citations. The outcome is a more complicated semantic structure of this polysemous noun as compared with the one given in the explanatory dictionaries of the Lithuanian language. Besides it was proved that automatic concording excludes human subjectiveness and gives a better view of usage. This conclusion was supported by the results of a psychological experiment, carried out in order see which meanings of klausimas prevail in human minds and therefore influence traditional lexicography.

In this paper metaphor is understood not as a mere poetic device or a rhetoric flourish but as a part of a conceptual system, a pervasive phenomenon in everyday life, not just in language but also in thought and action. War metaphor comprises figurative meanings of numerous war terminology. It is pursued here that war metaphor, which appeared in the Soviet period, is a borrowed term. The proof of this is that a rapid development of loan figurative meaning* caused gaps in the semantic structure of polysemic words and discarded many regular non-military substitutes. Such conceptual metaphors as "Work is War", "Argument is War" turned out to be especially pervasive. Once borrowed and dissimilated war metaphor became a universal way to view reality and one of the fundamental concepts in Lithuanian culture.

The analysis is based on a few theoretical assumptions. One of them is that politeness tends to be strategic in the sense that it employs a verbal strategy in order to attain some personal goal, i.e. to express the author’s opinion. Hence, the criticism in book reviews is strategic, since it involves strategic choices and their linguistic means. Moreover, it is conscious strategic behaviour in the sense of using means to get things done, in our case, obligatory criticism presented. Politeness involves ‘reflexive’ action, in the sense that it is not direct, naive, spontaneaous action, but rather reflected upon, deliberate, and premediated.” (Eelen 1999: 30). Another assumption concerns the object of analysis. In my view, linguistic strategies are Always discourse-based. The presentation of criticisms also obeys the principles of textual rhetorics, such as segmentation and ordering. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to take all the levels (sentence, paragraph, section and the full text) into consideration.