Vienas prijungiamųjų laiko sakinių su jungtuku kai vartosenos atvejis
Subordinate clauses with the conjunction kai: a case study

Summary/Abstract: The paper analyses a type of subordinate clauses with the conjunction kai, which are not characteristic of Lithuanian. Currently, they tend to appear in texts translated from English (cf. He watched through the window as the sleek little aircraft lifted smoothly off the runway and took to the wide blue-and-white sky above Honolulu).Word order in English, due to its analytical character, is much more fixed than in Lithuanian, which is a synthetic language. Therefore, the word order in an English sentence has limited possibilities to express functional sentence perspective. In English, it first of all expresses grammatical relationships between words rather than the information structure of the sentence.The above syntactic pattern has been adopted from English, which makes ample use of the conjunctions when, while and as rendered in Lithuanian as kai. It consists of the main clause, which expresses background information (rendered by an imperfective verb), and a subordinate clause, which focuses on the main action or activity (rendered by a perfective verb). From the point of view of functional sentence perspective, the theme of a sentence is expressed by the main constituent and the rheme—by the subordinate constituent.Such sentences in actual Lithuanian usage were noticed more than a decade ago, and their number tends to increase. In the publication on usage recommendations Kalbos patarimai (2003) an attempt was made to define such sentences; there was also a proposal made to amend them; however, the data of their actual usage was scarce. After collecting more data, they were analysed from the point of view of the functional sentence perspective. As a result, we can see that Lithuanian tends to express the relationship between an action or activity in the main clause and action or activity in the subordinate clause in a completely different way: the theme is expressed by the subordinate clause with the conjunction kai, and the rheme is expressed by the main clause. An inadequate translation of the clauses of time with the conjunction kai sometimes causes confusion. Therefore, background timing of the action or activity in standard Lithuanian should be expressed in other ways, mainly by participial, half-participial and gerundial adverbial modifiers of time, sometimes by subordinate clauses, where actions or activities in the two clauses go in parallel, are contrasted on an equal basis.

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