This paper aims to study cases when denominal and deadjectival (further referred to as denominal) verbs co-occur with their base words, cf. atstov-au-ti ‘to represent’ ← atstov-as ‘representative’ both (1) where the base word precedes the derivative and (2) where the base word is used after the derivative: (1) [PIRMININKAS]. Ačiū. Komiteto atstovas ponas K. Dirgėla, kuris komiteto pavedimu atstovauja šiam dokumentui [...] ‘[Chair-man] Thank you. The representative of the committee Mr. K. Dirgėla who represents this document’. (2) Bet vis dėlto mes, patinka kam ar nepatinka, atstovaujam tautai, esam tautos atstovai ir formuojam tam tikrą politiką [...] ‘But nevertheless, whether someone likes it or not, we represent the nation, we are the representatives of the nation and we form certain policies’. In these excerpts, the speaker uses the same stem both as a noun and as a verb (with the corresponding derivational suffix) and, as Lipka (1987: 64) argues, the use of the constituents of complex lexemes in the preceding or the following co-text creates lexical cohesion and coherence. We started with a 1 million-word corpus of modern Lithuanian to test the methods of our study and then moved to an 82 million-word corpus. The lists of denominal verbs of both corpora were compiled and a text search application was developed to locate the cases when denominal verbs co-occur with their base words. To determine the size of the search window, we used a test list of denominal verbs with the suffix -au‑ti. The window size determines the maximum distance the base word may be found before or after the denominal verb. When the window was gradually increased, the number of cases of co-occurrences also increased until the window of 170 words in one direction (= 340 words in both directions) words was reached. At this point, the number of cases found somewhat stabilized. [...]

The source of the research is the database of the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Nominal Phrases, which contains ca 69,000 phrases of varying length from 2 to 16 words. Phrases were extracted by the statistical method of Gravity Counts from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language (100 million running words). The analyzed data contain 3,704 two-word, 3,702 three-word and 870 four-word multi-word units (MWUs), which were detected automatically as being of one particular grammatical form; therefore, in this study, we refer to such MWUs as stable uniform MWUs. The results revealed that among stable uniform MWUs, there are fully fixed expressions (idioms, sayings, compound nominals, etc.). However, the majority of stable MWUs are collocations, which were extracted as one particular grammatical form due to the fact that this particular form had the highest frequency in the corpus. The stability of the form of such collocations is due to the governing constituents, e.g., a) cases of nominals (XX a. pirmaisiais dešimtmečiais) or b) prepositions, pronouns, numerals, adverbs or other inflected verb forms (sulig kiekviena diena, kartą per savaitę). Regarding the meaning of collocations, they can be classified into the semantic groups of place, time, manner, quality, object, and subject. From the point of view of usage, groups of specific discourse-bound collocations were identified, i.e., phrases from prayers, legal documents, horoscopes, etc. It can be concluded that the prevalence of a specific form is typical not only of idiomatic and semantically non-compositional MWUs but also of collocations usually defined as groups of semantically compositional and less stable MWUs.

In this paper, we analyze two-word phrases which consist of at least one noun. The phrases for the analysis were selected from the Dictionary of Lithuanian Nominal Phrases. The morphological analysis has revealed that almost a half of the phrases are built from two nouns. Adjective + noun is the second most frequent pattern (32,2%), and the verb + noun pattern (9,99%) is the third one concerning frequency. The classification according to the head of a phrase has shown the domination of noun phrases (96,4% of all two-word phrases). After the analysis of two-word phrases by their syntactic role, the results are as follows: 95% of all phrases are attributive phrases linked by the subordination relation, object phrases with subordination relation are the second most frequent phrases (3,42%), whereas phrases expressing other syntactic relations make up less than one percent each. The results have shown that the head of a phrase is usually used as the left constituent of a phrase, except for attributive phrases linked by subordination and interdependent object phrases. Variability of the phrases was investigated by the analysis of the inflectional and derivational features of the left and / or right constituent of a phrase. The results suggest that the most phrases (46%) are with two variable constituents; however, phrases with the left fixed constituent are also frequent (44%). The presented statistical data based on authentic usage complement the descriptions of the morphological and syntactic features of two-word phrases provided in Lithuanian grammars and theoretical studies and are relevant to quantitative evaluation of linguistics aspects and to automatic syntactic analysis.