Būtent kas yra būtent

Abstract

The object of this paper is the word būtent, which is one of the grammatical particles. The choice is not accidental, for the word būtent is classified as a particle only by the Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos žodynas (Dictionary of Contemporary Lithuanian, 1972), whereas in other linguistic words published then or later it is not mentioned at all nor is it included in any of the groups of particles distinguished by their shades of meaning with respect to whether they are clarifying, distinguishing, demonstrating, denying, affirming, emphasizing, fortifying, inquiring, doubting, comparing, desiring, or encouraging. Even grammars of the Lithuanian language fail to mention būtent as a particle. It is only in descriptions of Lithuanian punctuation (1992, 2006) that būtent is identified not just as a conjunctive word placed between a generalizing word and the sentence parts explicating it, but also as particle having modal significance; but here attention is entirely devoted only to punctuation. In the electronic Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos žodynas (Dictionary of Contemporary Lithuanian, 2011) the word būtent is characterized only as a conjunction. This article discusses the current usage of the word būtent and seeks to reveal the grammatical senses peculiar to it. In the course of investigating this non-inflected word, the term grammatical sense is treated as a part of speech. Data for this research were collected in the Lithuanian Science Corpus (CorALit) because in present-day scholarly speech this word occurs quite frequently. [...]