Participinių įvardžių vartojimo tendencijos, kreipiantis į adresatą
Tendencies of Using Participian Pronouns Referring to Addressee

Summary/Abstract: Tendencies of using participian pronouns permit to make the following conclusions: until Middle Ages there was no opposition of polite / impolite while using participian pronouns and one person was addressed using singular forms while a group of persons demanded plural forms. In many languages there are used polite forms of plural pronouns while addressing a person generalizing simple plural forms for this purpose. Some European languages have got special forms defining a simple group or polite form of plural.In some languages(e.g.German) the form of the third person plural (Sie) is used for expressing politeness. Plural forms of politeness were used in Middle Ages in oder to show social differentiation. In old Lithuanian works there were used two forms expressing politeness: the words from the Polish language tavo/jūsų mylista from which there derived pronoun tamsta and the forms tavo/jūsų sveikata which could be associated with the pronominal usage of the adjective sveikas. Choosing participian pronouns in modern Lithuanian language the attention is most often paid to the conversationalists’ closeness, age, sex, education and the degree of their acquaintance. Nevertheless only in the position acquaintance/stranger there are almost no prominent movements of usage: a stranger is always addressed using the polite pronoun Jūs. Differences of other relations become indistinct, losing the strictly expressed diversity of usage.

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