The referential use of English, to reiterate, is the use of this language for the purpose of pragmatically motivated communication, viz. instruction, management, and exchange of information or recording of experience (cf.: Drazdauskiene, 1983, 82). The referential use of language covers all intelligent communication, whether spoken or written, which has referential content. Such a use of language always has an extralinguistic context of reference and a definite objective goal often explicitly stated. In Ogden and Richards’s terms, this would be the use of language “characterised by the symbolic use of words, which, in its turn, means statements to record, organise and communicate references” (Ogden, Richards, 1923/1960, 149). Contemporary sources either ignored this question or have not improved this definition.

This chapter aims at revealing the essential in the overall analytic character of English in comparison with compact and synthetic character of Latin and Lithuanian.

The Orderliness of the Referential Use of English

While being a context-based use of language for the purpose of intelligent communication, the referential use of English testifies to the discipline of thinking and to the disciplined use of this language. In writing, the best specimen of the referential use of English are marked by grammatical orderliness, lexical accuracy, straightforwardness or limited directness and analytic clarity. What is meant by orderliness is structural regularity, clear logic of the statement and composition in addition to the precise and definite vocabulary. It also means lexical appropriateness and analytically explicit relations of words within the collocation.

Although all structural patterns of the sentence occur in the referential use of English and although complex sentences involve hierarchically subordinate (hypotactic) relations, English sentences are based on the structure of the proposition and on the linear arrangement of elements within the clause. A modern concept which encompasses the essential structure of the English sentence and its linearity is transitivity (Halliday, 1976). Even in scholarly studies, regular sentence structures, which extend by the principle of radiation to become units of moderate length, are the most frequent sentence patterns. The sentence centres on the verb often in the active voice with logically built transitive structures extending it. Transitive structures are also the nuclei of subordinate clauses and thus preserve the geometrical linearity of the overall sentence structure. When these structures include single or homogeneous modifying components, they are logically and semantically integrated and arranged by the same principle of geometric linearity. This adds to the rhythm and even to the rhetorical effects of the sentence. Complex sentences preserve their clarity because subordinate clauses are joined to the words they modify by overt verbal and logical links and are usually limited in number. Their every part amplifies on the message but preserves the formal propositional structure of the clause. Whatever the adjuncts or subordinate clauses, the English sentence preserves a linear structure which remains linear in extensions. The logic and relative simplicity of the sentence structure together with the active voice of the verb make the statements vigorous and the narrative lively in the best referential use of English.

To illustrate what has been said about the logic, orderliness and expressiveness of the referential use of English, two closing paragraphs of the Preface to Stuart England by J.P.Kenyon will be considered. The point of the author’s concern in the closing part of the Preface is his treatment of the seventeenth century history and the historian’s predicament with the terms applied to the period. J.P.Kenyon begins with reference to a brief overview of the seventeenth century England he has made:

If these remarks seem a poor introduction to yet another survey of this much-surveyed period, this is something for which I make no apology. Historians are often loath to admit to their readers the limitations of their powers. But no historian can provide a definitive account, even of one historical figure, in anything but strictly factual terms. He can state without fear of contradiction that civil war broke out in England in 1642, but he cannot state categorically why, and even his choice of terms - whether he calls this event a rebellion or a revolution, for instance - is often open to serious objections. He commonly uses terms like ‘gentry’ or ‘Puritanism’ which have no accepted definition, or terms like ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ whose meaning was disputed even by contemporaries, and is disputed still. In the seventeenth and earlier centuries these problems are the more acute for being disguised much of the time. For instance, it is fairly well known that seventeenth-century Englishmen rarely used our political term ‘revolution’, and when they did they usually attached a different meaning to it; but recent research has even cast doubt on the meaning in a seventeenth century context of the word ‘election’ (in a parliamentary sense). The very concept of majority election, it seems, was rudimentary and confused. Yet for want of anything better we have to go on using such terms, and other terms which would almost certainly have been meaningless to contemporaries, like ‘representation’, ‘constituency’ or ‘mandate’. Any interpretation of the past is not only anachronistic, but often written in anachronistic terminology.

In these circumstances the best I can offer is my own account of men and events as I see them, while trying to do justice to contrary or conflicting interpretations. Each chapter is furnished with a critical bibliography, printed at the end of the book, which will enable the studious or curious to proceed much further (J.P.Kenyon. Stuart England. – Penguin, 1978, pp. 11-12).

The message is not simple in the closing part of this Preface. It combines the essential facts of the principal historical event of the period, the terminology and its use, as well as the historian’s difficulties with the terms and his responsibility implying his boldness. These several aspects of the message structure would seemingly require complex grammar. But the grammar here is fairly simple. The load of the message is distributed among the clauses of different kinds, while the intensity of the narrative is achieved by the flexible use of the facts. They are used to condense the sense and highlight the new (or the rheme) in the sentences. The intensity also gains by the density of qualifying and evaluating vocabulary, as by the attitude of a rational, often impersonal author. The grammatical variation, to use the stylist G.W.Turner’s term, is obvious, while the sense of attitudinal components is subtle. Therefore an explanation of the significance of the text is bound to exceed the volume of the text itself.

What makes the referential use of English in this extract orderly is first of all word order. It is almost exceptionally ‘subject-predicate-object/complement’ structures that are used in these two paragraphs. Only two sentences begin with the fronted adverbial modifiers of place but, since such modifiers appear often in the fronted position in English, they do not upset the regularity of the syntax in and the comprehension of the above text. This seemingly routine syntax has nothing of fixed immobility about it, (a point of groundless anxiety to students). On the contrary, the narrative is lively and informative, with a live image of the author within it. The regular word order with the predicates both in the active and in the passive voice makes the statements well organised and easy to follow; it even adds an increased tempo to the run of the sentences.

With the international use of English widely spread, it is important to emphasise that the best referential use of English, which this text represents, exploits the expressive potential of the basic structure of the sentence to advantage, simultaneously preserving its standard grammatical organisation. The potential of the grammatical structure is exploited both for the statement of the message and for emphasis as well as for other accompanying effects. It is word order, which is strictly observed in English today, that allows the author to express his meaning, various accents and even attitude (cf.: Drazdauskiene, 1983, 82-85) without any additional verbal means. The text above is this kind of referential use of English, which is devoid of explicit transition words and parentheses, of impersonal sentences and of fact-based passive constructions. Instead, the statements are brief, in the active voice and therefore clear and vigorous. More than that, the first sentence in the text above is composed so that every following sentence takes the reader step by step to the principal problem of the historian - that of fact and its name (sentence 5). Whatever is introductory in this paragraph is dynamic rather than descriptive, and intensely so.

One can consider how the intensity of the initial part of the text cited above grows with the intensity of emphasis given to the beginning of the sentences. The first sentence is significant for what it implies, i.e. the confidence of a professional author to produce a new book in the field, rather than for what it says. It is therefore introductory to the whole book rather than to the short preface. Its position at the opening of the preface, though, is well exploited to introduce the author as a historian without naming him so. The second sentence states a general truth of the limitations of the powers of professional historians by the principal part of this simplest proposition. But it is also a qualifying utterance as it concerns the reluctance of historians to admit their predicament. It is turned into a strong statement by the evaluative verb ‘loathe’ in the active voice. All this is expressed in this single simple extended sentence with the regular word order. It is the evaluative component in the verb loathe that preserves the stylistic link of the second sentence with the first, and does it by contrast rather than by an unswerving commitment to tedious routine consecutiveness.

In the third sentence, which is also simple, the potential of pronouncements in history is stated, but stated in the negative of the opposite, which explains further a historian’s limitations, not a little by the sense of the initial ‘but’ in the sentence. In it, the subject has been turned into a singular noun from the plural. The negative particle to the noun makes the beginning of this sentence emphatic. Thus a relatively autonomous piece of information in the third sentence appears as a third step in this introduction with a strong beat for a start. Sentence 4 is of a complex compound structure which segments its propositional content: it touches upon the object in history studies, viz., what a historian can and cannot state and how vulnerable his statements may be because of his choice of terms. This longer sentence withholds somewhat the dynamic development of the preface mainly because of a long parenthetic clause it in. But the sentence is dynamic which is marked by its junctures - he can..., but he cannot...and ...is often open to..., that appear at short intervals. It is this kind of compact sense groups within longer English sentences in general that preserve their clarity and impressiveness. One should also note the regular word order. It is neither routine nor boring, but correct and emphatic mainly because of the subject repeatedly placed in the sentence initial position. The subject has been turned from the singular noun into the third person personal pronoun ‘he’, made informal and therefore emphatic in the context of a study in history. These few remarks have been intended to draw attention to the expressiveness that the regular word order of the English sentence permits. The expressiveness wrenched from the structural orderliness and logical precision in the referential use of English as illustrated indicates the expressive potential of English grammar in general.

The Directness of the Statement in the Referential Use of English

Another point which holds the reader’s attention in the above extract and which has been highlighted in the analysed specimen is the directness of the statements. This strengthens confidence in the author because the author sounds confident in himself. It is the author’s expertise in the history of the seventeenth century England that keeps him so direct. He considers the period to be his proper subject, which enables him to claim the right to publish a new work on the much-surveyed period with as assured comment as “for which I make no apology”. The vigour of the direct statements is strengthened by an occasional rhetorical device. It seems that it is the author’s linguistic proficiency that leads him even to the use of alliteration in the closing statements: contrary and conflicting interpretations. If this were an ordinary case of spontaneous alliteration, the studious or curious further on would be rhetorical and therefore expressive.

The directness of the statement is only one aspect of interpersonality in the referential use of English. Another aspect would be limited directness. Whether the statement is direct or of limited directness, its purport has two sides, the referential content of the message and a sense of interpersonality. Like in other uses of language, interpersonality in the referential use of English is not limited to relations between the author and the subject, and extends to those of the author and the reader. As is the case in the text above, the clarity of vision in the statements of fact and apt emphasis indicate an expert author who treats his subject with ease and confidence. It is in these relations that the author’s directness in expression acquires real sense, because both his expertise and self-consciousness come to the surface thus. As the subject in this text is the principal historical events of the period, the directness of the statements in it is motivated by the author’s knowledge and his respective confidence. When society comes to the fore in historical and sociolinguistic studies in English, historians often become more tentative in their statements. Sometimes the author’s attitude to society is objective and deferent. When it acquires emotive colouring, it is never overt or blunt. The attitude to the subject is usually part of the meaning of the words chosen, which need not be attitude words (cf.: Drazdauskiene, 1983, 82-85).

The author’s attitude to the reader in the text quoted above is related to his attitude to the subject. The author’s courtesy to the reader might be pointed out since the author’s language indicates that he treats the reader as an equal. The author’s awareness of the difficulties means his responsibility, which is also indicative of respect to the reader.

A closer look at the Preface from Stuart England by Kenyon, which has just been considered, reveals that the author is conscious of the directness of his own statements. He attempts to limit his directness to the subject matter, especially when it concerns precise senses in verbal usage in the seventeenth century. He modifies his statement by adverbs of degree when the point is the historian’s use of a concrete term: “...it is fairly well known that seventeenth-century Englishmen rarely used our political term ‘revolution’...”. A little further on, when the currency of another concept has to be assessed, the author resorts to a brief parenthesis ‘it seems’ to limit the degree of assurance on matters of understanding and usage in the seventeenth century: “The very concept of majority election, it seems, was rudimentary and confused.” Probably because these are statements from the Preface rather than from a discussion in the treatise, the author’s directness and its modification are elemental and explicit. But limited directness in the referential use of English may be subtle and deeper integrated syntactically.

To illustrate the limited directness of the statement when it is more obvious in the referential use of English, I should like to turn to social themes and studies in which the subject demands cautious attitude from the author. The style of Mr Kenyon in Stuart England is uniform throughout the book, and the author is as direct even in his discussion of the civil war, the execution of Charles I, of challenges to Charles II, of political and civil questions as he had been in the Preface considered above. Therefore to consider the limited directness of the statement in English, I shall quote a sociocultural study. The following examples have been drawn from The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart (Penguin, 1981): 1)Thus, the replacement of necessary household equipment is likely to rank lower in the scale than it would among the middle-classes; ... 2)He seems to me to indulge the northern working-class, by echoing their own view that no one can beat them at salty repartee and an unaffected four-square wisdom. 3) Changes in attitudes work their way very slowly through many aspects of social life. They are incorporated into existing attitudes and often seem, at first, to be only freshly presented forms of those ‘older attitudes’. 4) It may well be, however, that working-class people are in some ways more open to the worst effects of the popularizers’ assault than are some other groups. 5)It is hard to find a way through such a crowd, especially as the entertainers are adept at discouraging the subversive thought that outside there may be other, quieter regions. 6)The comfort they (i.e. attitudes against tendencies to indulge into glaring necessities - M.L.D.) give can easily be exaggerated, and it would be a dangerous mistake to assume from them that all these external forces have no internal effect and that therefore my main argument is undermined. 7)I am not speaking of the sense of social freedom which working-class people have today, of that sense which is illustrated by the lack any longer of a serious feeling that the aristocracy counts for much, and by the refusal of working-class girls to go into domestic service, even though conditions there may sometimes be better than in factories.

In all the cases of the above illustrations, the italicised parts of the sentences modify the statement of fact and indicate the author’s view. This, in its turn, represents the author’s expertise, subtlety and culture as well as his awareness of the reader who may hold other and more pronounced views. By expressing himself this way, the English sociologist does not prescribe his opinion to the reader, which enhances his authority on the subject and earns the reader’s trust in him.

As the quoted examples show, one of the subtlest ways of the expression of limited directness is modality (cf. examples 4, 6, 7 above) in the referential use of English. Next follow words expressing tentativeness, such as adverbs of degree and manner, likely, hard, etc. (cf. examples 1, 5 above), and certainly the verbs seem, tend (cf. examples 2, 3 above) and others, which turn the statements into deliberative utterances. The words expressing uncertainty in the examples above are the same as those in the excerpt from Stuart England by Kenyon, but the latter are deeper integrated syntactically as they appear as parts of the predicate groups (cf. sentences 1, 2, 5). There are also other ways of the expression of limited directness, and this aspect of meaning is not limited only to the written referential use of English. It is no less typical of the spoken referential use of English. For example: (8) I should think that perhaps it means that he would like you to go. (9) We might have. (10) I couldn’t begin to tell you about him. (11) I must say it was a curious colour-scheme. (12) I must say that old Louise is certainly doing her stuff. (13) It’s hardly very generous of her. (14) I don’t think she has the objectivity to be generous. (15) I don’t suppose it matters very much. Again, modality and words expressing supposition appear to be frequent in limiting directness in the spoken referential use of English. As one considers the effect of limited directness on the sense of the utterance, one finds that it diminishes the assurance of the speaker and increases courtesy and encouragement to the listener. It is an overall feature of English. Limited directness is essential in the phatic use of English, in which sociability and sharing are in focus and conducive to the very process of speaking and to the expression of a favourable attitude.

What has been illustrated and said about limited directness in the referential use of English does not mean that the British and Americans overdo the tentativeness of expression. It is not infrequently that the author writes in the first person in English and speaks straight like Mr Kenyon in the Preface to Stuart England cited above. The direct expression adds assurance and vigour to the author’s tone. Such vigorous expression may be said to be part of the image of the Anglo-Saxons that often derives from their written works. It is a realistic image as it reflects confidence arising from intellectual brilliance in which they excel.

Enough has been said on the varying degree of directness and the vigour of the statement in the referential use of English, and these features have been amply illustrated. But limited directness in English speech is an acknowledged verbal phenomenon and its result is progressive communication: it inspires confidence in writing and attracts the interlocutor in conversation. Moreover, the British seem to be sensitive to directness in speech. They happened to observe, in international contexts, that bluntness may be a national trait with some peoples and that it might be a special reminder to the British in communication (see footnote 42, p.72 above). Courtesy and tact in speech are innate to the British and Anglo-Saxon Americans, they are sensitive to it and notice it or its absence in international communication. Blunt expressions often carry comments in English fiction, too. What I have called limited directness in the referential use of English is this very phenomenon of courtesy and tact in speech. It has virtually overall spread in English and, as the impressions just mentioned confirm, is important to the British. Even commercial introductions to sociolinguistic studies of English point out, that such studies as Vague Language by Joanna Channell argue that “strategies for being vague constitute a key aspect of the communicative competence of the native speaker of English”. On the purely linguistic level of consideration, it might be noted that limited directness inherent in the referential and in the phatic uses of English adds new aspects to the idiom of this language (see further Chapter 9).

Analytic Clarity in the Referential Use of English

One more significant feature of the referential use of English is the analytic clarity. It affects both the message structure and the expression of interpersonality. Analytic clarity is the precision of concepts and their relations in syntactical structures, which extend to the explicitness of logical, syntactical and deep semantic relations in the collocation and in the clause. The above mentioned features of the orderliness of the referential use of English are present in the text cited below, which is an excerpt from a study in medieval English history:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

The year 1066 is the one date which everyone knows, however unmindful of the past he may be. In that year William, Duke of Normandy, led the last effective invasion of this island and by his conquest of it completed the racial pattern necessary for the evolution of the society of medieval England. He found a rich island off the coast of Europe of which the wealth had in the previous thousand years attracted first the Romans, then the Saxons, then the Norsemen and Danes. The Romans saw it as a source of minerals, slaves, and corn. Perhaps, too, they saw it as a place where individuals ill-endowed or in debt at home could settle on wide estates in a life as like that of the Roman countryside as the climate allowed. The Saxons and Angles saw it as a good land to settle in, to plant with villages and farms, a land where a nation could be built. The Norsemen deserting their barren land sought the same ends. With patient labour the Anglo-Saxons had created a rich and cultivated society. They had developed a literature and a complicated system of local government and taxation. The Danes and Norsemen destroyed much, but even in destruction they contributed to the last phase of Anglo-Saxon independence. They brought to the racial brew of England their own determined individualism, their robust humour, their love of legal subtleties. /.../ William of Normandy brought no great following to England. The army which defeated Harold near Hastings was no more than 6,000 or so, and of them many were mercenaries hired for the adventure and dismissed in 1070 when the north had been cowed into quiescence and Chester had submitted. The Norman invasion was not, like the Saxon or Danish invasions, a national migration. It was an aristocratic conquest led by a man who won a kingdom for himself and distributed estates among his followers. This new aristocracy replaced the English nobility who had formed the court of the old English kings. It soon came to dominate rural society and local government as well. But the Frenchmen, as contemporary English writers called them, were at first merely the top layer of a society in which the slow routines of the agricultural year remained the basic facts of life, and Englishmen pursued them as they had done for centuries before Hastings was fought and lost (Doris Mary Stenton. English Society in the Early Middle Ages. Penguin, 1981, Ch. 1).

The text quoted above is significant for its clarity which I shall try to consider in some detail. The dynamic narrative and the amount of information it contains are interrelated with its verbal features. Although the first sentence singles out the date of the Conquest as the most important date in the history of England, the narrative in the first paragraph is so dynamic that it tells the story of the British Isles in brief. In such a stream of narrative, the selection of words is very important, and it is in this that the author excels. Most of the words function as single units and most of the collocations are transparent semantically and syntactically free. The syntactical structure of sentence 2 and a balanced distribution of concrete and abstract words are notable. This sentence informs of the Conquest as one of several invasions, of the name of the Conqueror and of the effect of the Conquest. The concrete words (Duke, island, society, England, etc.) name the specific referents, while the abstract (invasion, conquest, evolution, etc.) denote so precisely the events and processes in question that they are as clear as the concrete words. Their terminological sense increases their value. For example, taken separately, the collocation the racial pattern would be abstract because of the meaning of the adjective in it. Minding that it names the social and spiritual mixture of nations after the invasions and the Conquest, this collocation acquires the sense of a concrete expression because of its limited reference and a contextually definite function. Another abstract noun, a term, evolution, names a historical process and is in line with the above mentioned collocation.

To give a focus to the enumeration of the invaders who had been attracted by the island, only one obvious and concrete collocation a rich island is required in sentence (3). This same succinct collocation helps the author to sum up the invaders’ aims in single statements. Only the Romans merit two statements, the second of which is indirect because of the supposition. It is also euphemistic describing unsuccessful Romans (individuals ill-endowed or in debt at home), who might have liked to settle on the island. Otherwise the two statements about the Romans are notable for the concrete words (a source, a place, minerals, slaves, corn, individuals, estates, etc.) that are employed in the description. The concrete words and the respective concepts on which the definitions of these words are based are simple and accurate enough to inform and impress a credible image of the invaders of the first century BC and AD on the mind of the reader of the twentieth century. The concrete description also confirms the author’s deep and masterly knowledge of the language and of the subject, and her professional trustworthiness.

It is noteworthy that the invaders of the island are mentioned in their chronological order. Following the Romans, the Saxons and Angles are mentioned as invaders lured by a good land. But this very statement (sentence 6) ends in a note on a nation. The point of the nation is not elaborate. It is made concrete and simple by the concrete verb built used with it. After a brief mentioning of the Norsemen, sentence (7) gains by the simplicity of its content and logic, which develops the narrative no less than the statements of fact. The author returns to the Anglo-Saxons in two descriptive statements. Both concrete and abstract words (labour, cultivated society, a literature, a complicated system, government and taxation) are used with terminological precision in them. One of the reasons of the clarity of the abstract words is that they are employed in the shortest syntactical patterns, such as attributive collocations of two elements, or of-phrases of maximum four members, and appear alternatively with concrete words. It is interesting to find that abstract nouns in sentences (6-11) are used exceptionally to denote concrete spheres of human activity and are used as single lexical items (a nation, a literature, taxation, in destruction). The meaning of these individual abstract nouns is not obscured by collocative relations and approximates the meaning of concrete nouns. When abstract nouns appear in collocations, the collocations are the simplest and include only two words (patient labour, a rich and cultivated society, a complicated system, local government, the last phase, Anglo-Saxon independence, determined individualism, robust humour, legal subtleties). Semantic links in these collocations are of purely denotative character because almost all of them are extralinguistically motivated: the words belong together as much as the things named belong together, which is common knowledge to the speakers. Since the modifying adjectives and participles also appear as single items, the collocations are based on explicit logical relations rather than on semantic bonds. The modifying words specify rather than obscure the meaning of the abstract nouns by complicated relations. The clarity of the collocation is thus preserved.

Sentences 10 and 11 inform of the effects of the invasions of the Danes and Norsemen and employ predominantly abstract words. Since, however, the abstract words are used in their terminological sense, appear as single units or in the shortest collocations and in transitive relations (especially in sentence 10), they acquire concrete designation. The verbs also contribute to clarity. The abstract words in these two sentences do not obscure the sense because their referents are definite whether limited by the co-text as in the case of destruction, phase and subtleties or by definition as in the case of independence, individualism and humour.

The concrete words, the definite and precise abstract words in the narrative of the first paragraph wholly are combined with such subtlety of the linguistic instinct that approximates rhetorical effects. The last sentence (11) of the first paragraph is especially impressive. Since the enumerated features of the Danes and Norsemen are appreciated, the favourable sense softens this statement of the invaders who are antagonists by definition. But the enumeration itself is important: it begins with the determined features of the character, includes humour and ends with legal subtleties. Since the Norsemen’s love of legal subtleties is the point, the word love adds a humane trait to the enumeration. The repeated possessive pronoun their and the absence of the conjunction lend rhetorical fineness to the enumeration. The transparency of the short collocations makes the enumeration with abstract nouns only a little vaguer than the one in sentence 4.

Two collocations, the racial pattern (sentence 2) and the racial brew of England (sentence 11), attract the eye. Although race and racial are terms in a historical study, the author’s use of the adjective racial is fairly bold in this text. Historians of minor and touchier nations would be likely to refrain from such a direct use of the term with respect to their own nation. But the point I should like to make is the analytic clarity of the collocations.

The collocation the racial pattern is more neutral because of the common noun in it, while the racial brew is significant for its nominal sense derived from the noun brew, meaning a mixture of ideas, events, qualities, etc. As the noun brew is rarer in reference to people than the noun pattern, the two collocations, which are equally denotative, create verbal variety in this co-text, which indicates the presence of a live and competent author. The choice of these words matter because collocations with the adjective racial are limited in modern English, not infrequently including nouns with a negative sense. The use of the nouns pattern and brew conceals analytic precision in deep semantic relations within the collocations. Since a second seme in racial means a group of people who have the same culture, history and language, this word applies to a single West European nation by definition. Moreover, since several peoples invaded the Celtic Britain and left their imprint on this nation, the use of the word racial is definite and motivated. Besides, Britain is the island which lies off the coast of Europe, and it is common to emphasise this division from mainland Europe. Minding both the social, historical and geographical aspects of Anglo-Saxon Britain, the choice of the adjective racial has terminological precision.

The combination of the nouns with the adjective racial in the above mentioned collocations is also semantically motivated. Since pattern means a model, design or way, it is only a prop word in this collocation to stand for a type, a model or a character. But the author’s collocation is racial pattern, and this noun has its particular sense, that of a structure or a model. As a common, countable, polysemic noun, pattern is linked with the adjective racial by its meaning of ‘model’. The seme ‘model’ matches the seme ‘historical, linguistic and cultural blend’ in the adjective racial. Though there is no deeper semantic bond between these two words, their combination is analytically motivated by the existing equivalence between the meaning of ‘model’ and ‘blend’ in the semantic structure of these words. The two semes have a single and immediate link in the collocation, which is not obscured by any additional semes. This is a significant feature of semantic relations in English collocation traced analytically.

Although probably derived by metaphoric extension, the noun brew also retains its direct sense, that of any mixture of circumstances, ideas, events, etc., in the collocation. Although not strictly terminological, its use is not entirely arbitrary, either. The principal seme, that of a mixture of peoples, links it with the sense of a group of people, although of different origin but united by history, language and culture, retained in the adjective racial. The collocation is thus analytically clear because of a single semantic link that is traceable between the words and that is activated in it.

True, it is unlikely that the author chose these words as an issue of a similar analysis. It must have been the author’s linguistic instinct that had prompted such an option. The linguistic instinct perfected by the permanent currency of the likewise organised language. The idea of my analysis has been to look into the deep semantic relations and to show how language exposes what the linguistic instinct conceals. It has also been to show the analytic precision and clarity governing the use of the word within the collocation in English. As is evident, what the linguistic instinct of the English seems to conceal, is at least single immediate links between the words in the collocation made of other than conventional or purely terminological units. Similarly, the words seem to be chosen to fit into explicit and larger syntactical patterns, as the previous remarks on the use of the concrete and abstract words meant to imply. Indeed, it is the praised accuracy in the choice of the words that produces clauses as succinct units with the geometric linearity of the structure and unobscured clarity of relations among the words in them. What I have tried to explain rationally about the semic links within the collocation and the clause belongs to the power of the linguistic instinct of the native speaker. What might be termed as the linguistic expertise of the author in other cases, is the professional brilliance and the linguistic instinct of the native speaker in the present case.

In the second paragraph of the text, the same mode of narrative is pursued. The concrete and abstract nouns are similarly chosen and combined. This paragraph highlights another feature in the clarity of English. Verbs are more numerous in the opening of this paragraph (sentences 12-13). The fact that the text is not noun-ridden, that verbs are in the active and, occasionally, in the passive voice and form fairly short and lucid predicative constructions shows that the narrative is clear and dynamic. The functioning of the verbs on a par with the nouns and a reduced number of nouns, especially that of the abstract, have been a known means enabling a writer to avoid vagueness in English (cf.: Fowler, 1994, 15).

Looking for the analytic clarity of English in a text, one has to focus on collocations. The character of the army and the Conquest given in six sentences out of seven is no straight line narrative. All events that accompanied the Conquest are introduced alongside with it. But the many facts and events are enumerated in simple short sentences giving the impression of the Conquest and the actions of the conquerors as if they had been comprehensible to the English from the start and had kept them intellectually free. The compact and intensive description of the Conquest testifies to the author’s intelligence, professional and linguistic expertise as does the integration of fact and judgement.

The sense of the narrative and the analytic clarity of English are most notable in the last sentence (18), which states that the Conquest never affected the routine life of the English and that they were submerged only outwardly. It is in the closing statement in which one comes across the collocations which testify additionally the analytic clarity of English. The collocation the slow routines of the agricultural year is a phrase interesting both as a descriptive item and as a semantic unit. Descriptively it covers all the time of a fixed period in routine engagements of the people, while semantically it shows analytically clear relations of the nouns with the modifying words in the collocation. It is designation rather than denotation that lends a motivated link to the of-phrase: the slow routines are joined with the agricultural year by virtue of the equivalence of the extralinguistic relations in the referents. The whole of-phrase is thus extralinguistically motivated and has little to do with analytic semantics. It is the semantic links within modifying units (adj + n) in the of-phrase that should be analysed to bring out analytic clarity in English.

The collocations the slow routines and the agricultural year are not idiomatic. Why are they obvious and clear? Semantically they are transparent, but the selection of words in them confirms the principle of analytic clarity. Thus, routines denotes the usual work and engagements on the farm because routine means a fixed and regular way of doing things, while farm work is implied by the collocation the agricultural year. Since work in agriculture follows the natural sequence of the seasons and phenomena, its speed depends but very little on the dexterity of the farmer. The farmer has rather to adapt himself to the changes in nature. Therefore his work can hardly be accelerated and is rarely speedy. Hence is the adjective slow to qualify the routine work of the farmer. Moreover, in the context of the Conquest, slow also implies the determination of the farmer in his engagements and faithfulness to his native land. It is a complimentary word. All these strands of meaning are drawn from the extralinguistic context and show why the adjective slow is joined with the noun routines on extralinguistic grounds. But in the context of the present consideration, it is relevant to ask whether there are any semantic links which would motivate the collocation the slow routines semantically. Since routine means a fixed way of doing things, the adjective slow, which means not moving quickly, taking a long time, not fast, echoes the meaning of the manner as an aspect of sense in the noun routines. There is no deeper semantic link than the seme ‘a manner of doing things’ that keeps the two words together. That is why the collocation the slow routines is transparent as a word combination. It is a free collocation, the link in which is motivated extralinguistically. Its semantic motivation is very minor. Since the meaning of slow as a manner of doing things agrees with a fixed way of doing things, which is the meaning of a seme in the semantic structure of the noun routines, the extralinguistic bond in the collocation the slow routines is obvious, while its semantic motivation is inconspicuous.

The modifying collocation the agricultural year, which is the second part of the of-phrase in the text, is a similar collocation. A year means a fixed period of time whether that taken by the earth to travel once round the sun or that which extends from the 1st of January to the 31st of December. The period is known as the calendar year. Since farm work and the farmer’s engagements do not coincide with the calendar year, the noun year takes a qualifying word in the text. This word is the adjective agricultural. By using the adjective agricultural, the author specifies the noun year for it to mean a period marked by the practice of cultivating the land and breeding the animals. These are the extralinguistic reasons motivating the collocation the agricultural year.

The semantic bond in this collocation is quite simple. The measurement of a period of time in agriculture is a season of the year and a whole year, though not identical with the calendar year. Thus the author retains the noun year to mark a complete period of time in agriculture and qualifies it by the respective adjective agricultural. The seme which holds the two words together is ‘a period of a definite engagement’. There is no deeper semantic link in the collocation the agricultural year. It is a free collocation motivated extralinguistically and only partly semantically.

In both collocations, the slow routines and the agricultural year, the semantic bond is very weak. The concrete words in them belong together as much as the phenomena in nature do. They are clear because their semantic bond, weak though it is, depends on the natural and obvious proximity of these concepts, which may also be logically explained. The ground of these collocations suggests that they are a historian’s collocations rather than conventional ones. The clarity of the bond in them is kept up by the concrete words. That is why these collocations are as lucid as conventional collocations in English and as definite as the terms.

There is one more collocation in the text above, the combinability of words in which is but little semantically motivated. The collocation the basic facts of life is too obvious to subject it to a drastic rational analysis. Its unity depends on the general meaning of the separate words. The use of the word fact is an interesting point in it. Since the noun fact means a thing that is known or can be proved to have happened, to be true or to exist, it is the word precise and neutral enough in the context. The noun event, for example, would be too big a word to apply in general to the routine occurrences in farming. What is more, the word facts denotes all routine occurrences as real and implies that the daily engagements of the subjugated people never ceased and made their life virtually complete.

The use of the word life might also be noted. The use of this word must have been prompted by the topic of the narrative in the two paragraphs and by the previously used collocation the slow routines of the agricultural year to give weight to this last phrase. Life as the qualities, events and experience of human existence means man’s total involvement in the various activities. The use of the word life in the context of the Conquest means that the subjugated people never gave up their routine engagements which were essential to them, filled their existence as before and kept them spiritually free. Therefore life is a weighty word in this context. It emphasises that routines of the agricultural year were their real life, which the English, however subjugated, lived as before. The significance of the word life acquires such prominence in the text that it becomes the most emphatic word in conclusion. Although these are common words as single items and in combinations, the slow routines of the agricultural year and life are complimentary to the subjugated farmers. As has been noted above, English authors are not eloquent in self-directed attitude and still less in self-praise. To denote the constancy of the subjugated yet unconquered people by a word or two is just the manner of expression among the English authors.

The clarity of these word combinations also depends on their length. I have reviewed only combinations of two words, which are regular in the analysed text. So short word combinations are clear because nothing obscures relations of the words in them and their syntactical link is immediate.

The precision of single words, the one-to-one semic links between words in collocations, and the logic of nominal and predicative groups in longer syntactical sequences is unsurpassed in English. A result of such usage is the overall currency of monosemic concepts in delicate and surface grammar. For want of a better word, I have called it the analytic semantics of English, but it really is ‘semantic analyticity’, (if this item of broken English may be excused). It means concrete concepts and deep yet motivated relations both in collocation and in grammar. This semantic regularity highlights that aspect of meaning in English, which had for years been known from the call for the exact word and clear thinking in all composition manuals. It is just that it is difficult to illustrate it properly with reference to the obvious, while the text above is notable for the definite use of single words as of free word combinations. I shall continue with analytic clarity in the referential use of English drawing the material from three languages - two synthetic and one analytical. Ultimately, I hope to make the principal source of the influence of the referential use of English on thought sufficiently clear.

The point which requires further consideration is the analytic clarity of semes in links between the English words as they are joined in minor and major syntactical units. This clarity is assisted by the grammatical orderliness of English, which is most obvious in its word order which “has never been as strict as it is now” (cf.: Potter, 1969, 162; Lucas, 1955, 39). The concrete character and the analytic clarity of words in collocations and sentences have been shown to amount to the analytic semantics of English. This matter has been little discussed in scholarly literature (cf., though, Vachek, 1976) and I should like to focus on it while comparing English with two synthetic languages - Latin and Lithuanian. The point again will be analytic clarity and precision of the meaning of single words and of the words in one-to-one semic links in collocations. But this is not to be the structurally based division of concepts. For example:

pallida Mors aequo pede pulsat pauperum tabernas regumque turres

pale death knocks with impatient foot

at poor men’s huts and king’s castles. (Horatius. Od., I. iv, 13-14)

When pauperum tabernas is translated as poor men’s huts and regumque turres as and kings’ castles we have basically a structural arrangement of the words. It is most obvious when certain compact words missing in the target language are translated descriptively (Drazdauskiene, 2001). Moreover, in the present case the plural Genitive is retained even in English and the of-construction is avoided. I shall not consider the two words poor men’s, which is the equivalent of the Latin pauperum, a case of analytic semantics (cf., though, Vachek, 1976, 312), because this is a case of morphology rather than semantics. There is no other way to render a concept expressed by one word in the source language than two or more words in the target language, in which a single word equivalent does not exist (cf..: probitas laudatur et alget /Juvenal, I.14/ translated as honesty is commended and left in the cold). This process involves only more or less mechanical division of concepts, and the words themselves are usually the exact equivalents of the Latin roots, as in the case above. This aspect of difference in Latin and English grammar had been noted by British grammarians (Quirk et al, 1972, 8-9).

Still less I shall be concerned with the syntactical-morphological division of words in the analytical language in its own right, as in: Ex necessitate rei translated as from the necessity of the case, and Ei morbo nomen est avaritia /Cicero/ translated as the name of that disease is avarice. In cases like this, analytical processes in semantics are not involved in translation and in the selection of the words. It is only a case of structural transposition realised, as a rule, by special means, i.e. the prepositions, in the analytical language. The change of word order from indirect to direct in English in the translation of the latter example is a point of grammatical structure entirely, although prepositions do mark an aspect of the analytical character of English. But these two examples and their translations represent most obvious cases of structural equivalence in the two languages.

The point of interest in the present consideration will be deep semantic relations. Surface differences, while not ignored entirely, will be treated as something predetermined by the structure of the languages under consideration. I shall focus on a Latin text translated into English and Lithuanian46. It is Part I.1 from De senectute by Cicero. At the start, Part I.1 from De senectute and its translation into English and Lithuanian will be wholly compared. Even the volume of the text indicates differences among the three languages: the English translation is the longest, while the Lithuanian is virtually the same length as the Latin original. This is regular: because of structural differences and verbal explicitness, which is part of analytic clarity in English; the English translations of Lithuanian texts are also always longer. The English translation of the opening stanza in De senectute is also longer by one line (line 3), which is added to hold periphrasis. The phrases are longer because of their explicitness, because of transitive constructions, of the longer English Future tense form and other descriptive collocations which replace the compact Latin words. The Lithuanian translation of the opening stanza is virtually identical with the Latin original both in verbal equivalence, line length and in the number of lines.

A more detailed analysis of the opening stanza shows that English requires several words for virtually every content word in the synthetic language of the original. This would be the surface aspect of analytic clarity. On the semantic level, the distribution of concepts in parts of the sentence which makes the opening stanza differs: the first line of the Latin original is a complete transitive construction in a conditional clause (si quid te adiuvero curamve levasso). Identical grammatically and as complete a transitive construction is retained in the Lithuanian (‘jei padedu tau ir palengvinu rūpestį tavo’). The conjunction ‘ir’ (and) which is added in the Lithuanian translation is optional. Without the conjunction, the first line would have gained loftiness usual in Lithuanian lyrical poetry. The conjunction, when added, makes the first part of the conditional clause in line 1 of the opening stanza sound more prosaic in the Lithuanian translation.

Otherwise the Lithuanian translation of the first line is literally and semantically equivalent: the first person of the Futurum II Indicativi activi verb adiuvero has been translated by the first person Present Indefinite form ‘padedu’ in the Lithuanian. The first person of the Futurum II Inidicativi activi verb levasso has been translated by the first person Present Indefinite form ‘palengvinu’. The Accusative singular form curamve has been translated by the same case form in the Lithuanian ‘rūpestį’.

It is only the single Accusative form of the personal pronoun te in the original that has been reiterated in the Lithuanian twice as the Dative form ‘tau’ (for you) to the verb ‘padedu’ (adiuvero) and as the Genitive form ‘tavo’ (your) to the verb ‘palengvinu rūpestį’ (curamve levasso). The two forms of the personal pronoun ‘tau’ (for you) and ‘tavo’ (your) have been used in accord with the norm of grammatical government in Lithuanian. Their repeated use in postposition to the verbs is in accord with poetic licence in Lithuanian: this line in the Lithuanian translation is thus focused on the second person to express intimate concern.

In the English translation, the first line of the opening stanza (O Titus, should some aid of mine dispel) contains only the subject-predicate group of the conditional clause (‘should some aid of mine dispel’). The subject-predicate group fills the whole first line in the English translation because the Latin Futurum II Indicative active verbs adiuvero (I ease/I help) and lavasso (I lessen /the burden/) have been rendered by using the noun ‘aid’ in the of-phrase. This phrase contains three determining words: the indefinite pronoun ‘some’ which makes the noun phrase ‘some aid’ explicit and indefinite; the Possessive pronoun ‘mine’, which determines the of-phrase in Modern English and, with it, a third word, the preposition ‘of’. With this shift of focus on the concept of aid and on the Possessive pronoun ‘mine’, the second person personal pronoun te (Dat. You) is gone from the first line in the English translation altogether. The subjunctive form ‘should dispel’ completes the subject-predicate group and makes the first line full in the English translation - ‘should some aid of mine dispel’. The first person subject, which is built in morphologically in the verb flexions in the Latin adiuvero and the Lithuanian ‘padedu’ has been expressed by the Possessive pronoun ‘mine’ . Thus the focus in the first line in the English translation has been shifted again from two verbs expressing support and ease (adiuvero and lavasso) to the nominal phrase ‘aid of mine’ and a single verb ‘dispel’. One should note that the Absolute Possessive pronoun ‘mine’ in the Genitive relation with the subject group (‘some aid of mine’) in the English translation also gains grammatical explicitness by its elaboration, i.e. the first person subject, which is expressed morphologically by the verb flexions in Latin and Lithuanian, is made semantically explicit in English owing to the preposition of. The English translator thus managed to render only one half of the sense of the first line here.

In the Lithuanian translation, both the Latin verbs adiuvero and lavasso are rendered by two near synonyms ‘padedu’ (I help) and ‘palengvinu’ (I ease) in the Lithuanian in the first line of the opening stanza. The first line in the Lithuanian is longer by one word, which is the second person Genitive pronoun ‘tavo’. This pronoun in postposition to the Accusative noun ‘rūpestį’ (care) is rhetorical and emphatic. Semantically, it reiterates the sense of the personal pronoun in the Dative ‘tau’ (to you) used earlier in the same line. The syntactical relations in this part of the conditional clause are expressed by the verb flexions in the Lithuanian the way they are expressed in the original Latin. The Latin apostrophe O Tite is retained in the translations, and a single word (‘O Titus’ and “Tite’) satisfies both the English and the Lithuanian.

The second line of the opening stanza in the Latin original (Quae nunc te cocquit et versat in pectore fixa) is an attributive clause which qualifies the Accusative noun curamve (care) in line 1. The second line of the Latin original centres on two compact Latin verbs - coquit (torments) in the Present Indicative Active and versat (whirls) in the Present Indicative Active, too. These two compact verbs (coquit and versat) are pivotal in line 2 of the Latin original. The syntactical relations of these verbs with the Accusative noun curamve in line 1, are predicative and expressed by the third person flexion -t of the verbs. The second verb versat enters a poetic Locative phrase, in pectore, which is modified by the perfect passive participle fixa. The attributive clause in line 2 is grammatically complete in the Latin original.

In the English translation, line 2 contains only the syntactical object, which is the definite noun ‘the cares’ modified by a relative clause, ‘that now in they bosom dwell’. This relative clause renders accurately the poetic Latin Locative phrase quae versat in pectore fixa but covers only one half of the attributive clause of the original, which takes a whole line 2 (Quae nunc te coquit et versat in pectore fixa). The rendering of this part of the Latin attributive clause shows how concepts may be blended in poetry in English which otherwise is always analytical. In translating the original Latin clause quae ... versat in pectore fixa, the English translator has chosen the verb ‘dwell’. This verb is only a poetic equivalent of the Latin in pectore fixa (is stuck in the bosom), but it compounds the meaning of the Latin verb versat and of the participle fixa. The phrase nunc te cocquit is missing in the English translation of this line. It seems that, for want of the verbs as compact as those in the Latin original, the English translator has used the plural noun ‘cares’ and has managed with a single verb ‘dwell’ in the second line.

The only additional word in the English translation of this line is the Possessive pronoun ‘thy’, which is structurally predetermined in English. The English translation of the first two lines do not contain a single word combination of at least two words and therefore indicates nothing of deep analytic semantics in this language. So far I have been speaking about features of the surface analytic clarity in English when I showed, for instance, how the original Latin verbs in line 1 were rendered by the English nominal phrase ‘some aid of mine’ and how it filled the whole line 1 in the English translation.

In the Lithuanian translation of line 2, the original is contained complete, with one word ‘trikdo’ (upsets) added. Only the order of the concepts observed in the original Latin description of a man upset by worry is reversed. The attributive clause in the second line in the Lithuanian translation begins with an idiom, ‘kuris įsiėdė širdin’ (which has drilled into the heart) and ends with an explication of how the worry affects man - ‘tave vis graužia ir trikdo’ (pesters you and upsets). It is obvious that the Latin original line 2 is rendered accurately in the Lithuanian, with the verb ‘trikdo’ (upsets) simply amplifying on the original concept in coquit.

` If one now compares the English and Lithuanian versions of line 2 in translation, one can clearly see why the second line in the English covers only one half of the attributive clause in line 2 of the original. While the Lithuanian translator can render the complete content of the attributive clause within the same line because he has the verbs (‘įsiėdė’ and ‘graužia ir trikdo’) as compact as those in the Latin original (versat and coquit) at his disposal, the English translator has to take a long way to say the same. Moreover, ‘the cares’ (curamve) from the first line of the original appears as the pivotal word on the second line in the English to fix the attributive clause to it. That comes from the structural constraints in English - attributive clauses or phrases are always parts of the parts in the English sentence and have to be placed in the nearest proximity to the word modified. Thus, the second line in the English translation has to cut two words of the original. The attributive clause modifying the word ‘the cares’ in the English in line 2 expands to take only one half of the original line because, to render the meaning of the four words versat in pectore fixa, the English translator requires five words even when he manages to condense the meaning of versat ... fixa in one English word ‘dwell’. Although this is surface analytic clarity, it costs words analytically related in English.

Line 3 is wholly additional in the English translation. Line 3 in the original Latin and in the Lithuanian translation is the concluding rhetorical question. Since the English translator has yet the word coquit (literally ‘tire’) to render, which is pivotal in the first part of the attributive clause in the original, he adds this extra line and extends it so as to gain a perfect rhyme and rhythm scheme in a four-line stanza. Having created the space of a whole line to himself, the English translator has chosen the verb ‘torture’ to render the meaning of coquit, relegated it to the second half of the additional line and specified the concept of ‘torture’ by an abstract noun, ‘pain’, in the idiomatic function of the prepositional object, which he had to do to be at least marginally true to the meaning of the original coquit.

To complete the additional line 3, the English translator has set out to produce a perfectly metrical quatrain. So he has created a periphrasis of the original versat in pectore fixa in an emotive verbal group ‘wring thy heart’, which amplifies on the concept of the bosom in which cares dwell, contained already in the second line of the English translation. It seems that, having no verbs as compact as those in the Latin original at his disposal and having begun a descriptive rendering of the original verbs coquit and versat, (a decision which predetermined analytical structural constraints in the English), the English translator produced a semi-free rendering of the first two lines of the original and required three lines to do it.

Line 3 in the Latin original is a rhetorical question which gives the opening stanza the guise of an actual utterance as if it were in a letter or talk. The sense of the rhetorical question Ecquid erit praemi? is good humour, a kind of encouragement by teasing, as between men. The original rhetorical question is only three words - the question word ecquid (what), the verb esse in the Indicative Future I form erit (would be) and the object noun praemi in the Genitive singular. This rhetorical question is as brief in the Lithuanian translation - ‘kas man už tai dovanų?’ It is, in fact, only one syllable longer than the original. Although the Lithuanian translator could have been even briefer and literally true to the original, he chose to miss the verb, which the structure of the synthetic language allows, and to explicate the personal aspect of the question by the direct object ‘man ‘ (to me) and by the prepositional object ‘už tai’ (for that). The pivotal word praemi in the Genitive singular in the original question has been translated in the Lithuanian by as compact a noun‘dovanų’ (a present/treat) in the Genitive plural, but this is part of the idiom of Lithuanian.

This is line 4 in the English translation, which makes a perfect rhyming quatrain. The complete sense and structure of this line in the English translation will be discussed further on. In this context I shall focus on the rendering of the original noun praemi in the English.

The original rhetorical question of three words is thrice as long in the English translation. It seems that the English translator could have been briefer, but he chose to make his four line stanza metrically complete. Thus, the English translation of line 3 not only amplifies on the sense of the original question but also shows how the number of words increases in English when the equivalents of the original words have to be adjusted to the explicit and linear clause structure in English and subjected to the semantic law of analytic clarity in this language. The analytic clarity of English demands predominantly concrete words, a certain degree of surface logic and one-to-one monosemic links between the words in collocations.

Thus, the English translator has replaced the principal word praemi in the original rhetorical question by the of-phrase ‘the measure of my gain’. The reason is obvious. First, neither the noun ‘gift’ nor ‘present’ cannot be used in the English because, for one, it is not ‘donum’, for instance, that is used in the Latin original and, for the other, none of the two English nouns satisfies the semantic constraints of the rhetorical question in English: these English nouns are simply too concrete for a rhetorical question. Second, the English translator has opted for the noun ‘gain’, which renders the sense of the Latin praemi fairly accurately. But, by itself, the meaning of ‘gain’ is too broad for the rhetorical question in point and a little too general to be idiomatic in English in the function of a direct object. Therefore the English translator had to modify the noun ‘gain’ by an amount word, which could not be a concrete word. The amount word had simply to specify the concept ‘benefit/profit’ as an aspect of the seme ‘advantage’ in the meaning of ‘gain’, quantitatively. The linguistic instinct of the English translator has adjusted the word ‘measure’ well in the semantic-structural conditions of the of-phrase in English. Neither in its sense of a thing gained nor of an advantage given, does the seme ‘benefit’ in the noun ‘gain’ require quantitative modification. But the seme ‘profit’ in the meaning of the noun ‘gain’ allows quantitative modification, and the monetary sense is prior to the sense of benefit and advantage in it. Moreover, the seme of profit as purely additional in the original context adds humour to the rhetorical question. The noun ‘measure’, in its turn, has the seme of amount in its meaning. So the permissive semic potential in the noun ‘gain’ for the sense of quantity matches the seme of amount in the noun ‘measure’. Even though the syntactical relations between the noun ‘measure’ and ‘gain’ in the of-phrase in the English translation are made explicit by the preposition, this additional one-to-one semic agreement in the sense of quantity between the two nouns in the of-phrase fixes a deep semantic link between them and explains the choice of the noun ‘meassure’ in the English rendering of the Latin praemi to specify the noun ‘gain’.

A vague quantitative sense in ‘the measure of my gain’ further implies a sense of actuality and humour in the rhetorical question in the English translation. As has been mentioned above, the original Latin rhetorical question retains a sense of good humour semantically and contextually. This rhetorical question in the original pragmatically rounds up a longish conditional sentence one aspect of the sense of which is not pleasure; it is rather its contrary. Minding that it is the English translator’s linguistic instinct that managed the deep and surface analytic clarity within the structural-semantic constraints of this language to choose so apt equivalents and produce a semi-free translation of the original stanza, one has to appreciate the result. But one can also appreciate how delicate and deep semantic relations are hidden in the idiom of English and what complex mechanism of analytic clarity should be mastered by anyone to use this language with any degree of proficiency. The Lithuanian translation of the original Latin stanza indicates that the range of semantic networks does not stretch that wide and that deep in this synthetic language. There is more word to word equivalence between the original Latin and the Lithuanian as there is structure to structure equivalence between these two languages. What the English gains by explicit description, the Lithuanian retains compact. The Lithuanian therefore retains some general vagueness peculiar to the original Latin, so important in translation equivalence and still more in the experience with poetry in general.

Consider further, for example, the English and Lithuanian translations of the first four lines of the Third Ode from Book II by Horace:

Aequam memento rebus in arduis

servare mentem non secus in bonis

ab insolenti temperatam

laetitia, moriture Delli. (Horatii Carmina, II.3, 1-4)

Keep this in mind: a steady head on a steep

path; the same holds true when the going is good:

don’t let happiness go to your head,

friend Dellius, for you must die someday

(Horace. Od., II.3, 1-4. Translated by Joseph P. Clancy)

Atmink išsaugoti lygsvarą širdyje

nelemtą metą, o sëkmėje taip pat

mokėki, Delijau mirtingas,

džiaugsmą per didelį suvaldyti, -

(Horacijus. Giesmės, II.3, 1-4. Translated by Henrikas Zabulis)

When aequam mentem is translated as a steady head and rebus in arduis as on a steap path, one can expect to trace instances of analytic semantics affecting the bond between the words in these attributive English collocations. The Latin aequam mentem is a collocation which includes the Accusative singular adjective aequam and the Accusative singular noun mentem. The words agree in the flexions, and it is this morphological agreement that indicates semantic relations between the words when they are distanced from each other in the Latin text. As a complete Latin transitive construction including a goal, the collocation Aequam ... servare mentem literally means ‘to preserve the balanced mind/heart’. A steady head in the English translation is a collocation with a concrete noun head for the Latin abstract noun mentem, and the first indication of the analytical character of English. It is not a major deviation from the meaning of the original collocation. On the one hand, such a choice of the words in the English collocation is partly determined by the immediate context - the semantics of the adverbial modifier of place on a steep path; on the other, the English word steady contains a seme which means ‘firmly fixed and balanced’, so that semantically, too, steady is a close equivalent of the Latin aequam. But the concrete character of the English a steady head produces a more rigid and less colourful image than the original collocation.

The English translation has a less determined and rigid syntactic structure of the sentence: the direct imperative is gone, while a steady head on a steep path, which is a more or less independent phrase, may be treated as an elliptical imperative. It may be even assumed that this elliptical imperative shares the verb keep with the previous imperative Keep this in mind. At least such a supposition does not violate the semantics of English or the implication of the English sentence. In so loose a syntactical structure in English, the collocation a steady head retains a more or less independent syntactical function and meaning. If we assume that a steady head is part of the elliptical imperative in the English translation, then this collocation would morphologically approximate the Latin Accusative singular. But if we assume that a steady head is part of the elliptical declarative sentence, then this collocation would be the Nominative singular in English. Whichever the case, the point of interest in the present consideration is the interior bond within the collocation a steady head.

As a structural and semantic equivalent of aequam mentem, a steady head implies analytical semantics wholly, because a concrete noun head is used as an equivalent of the abstract Latin noun mentem. However, this unit is neither a conventional collocation nor an idiom, and so its inner bond is of significance and interest. The only motivated link in the inner bond of this collocation is the seme meaning ‘firmly fixed and balanced’ in steady. By virtue of the meaning of this seme, the adjective steady combines with the noun head, which in this case is supposed to mean ‘intellect and power of reason’. Whatever sense of another seme in steady, which means ‘done, happening or making in an even and regular way’, may be prominent, it cannot motivate the bond within the collocation a steady head. There is no equivalent seme in head for that. But the important thing is that two morphologically unmarked words which make up this collocation in English retain an analytically motivated link, which is all the intricacy of the semantics of the attributive collocation in this analytical language.

The Lithuanian translation of the first line of the Ode as Atmink išsaugot lygsvarą širdyje (Remember to preserve balance in your heart) is very close to the original but analytically vaguer than the English translation. The Lithuanian translator uses an imperative clause with the infinitive išsaugot for the Latin servare. He further chooses the Lithuanian Accusative singular lygsvarą for the Latin aequam and the Lithuanian Locative širdyje for the Latin mentem. Thus the Lithuanian translator is close to the original morphologically and semantically. But as a whole, the Lithuanian lygsvarą širdyje is metaphoric and has nothing of the analytical semantics of the English a steady head in it. One has to appreciate the precise metaphoric sense of this collocation in Lithuanian, though, which is absent in the English analytically clear collocation a steady head.

The inner bond of the collocation on a steep path used as an equivalent of the Latin rebus in arduis in the English translation is only a little less interesting. The Latin prepositional collocation rebus in arduis includes the Ablative plural of the noun res, i.e. rebus (things) and the Ablative plural of the adjective arduum with the preposition in, i.e. in arduis (on the steep). This collocation could be literally translated as ‘(when) things (are) on the steep’, i.e. when they are in a dangerous position. It must be noted that the English equivalent of this collocation is very concrete and very close to the literal meaning of the Latin collocation.

In the Lithuanian translation of the same line, for example, rebus in arduis is translated by an attributive collocation in the Accusative singular nelemtą metą (at the unfortunate time), which is as abstract in sense as the original collocation and is closer in sense to another Latin idiomatic collocation res arduae (clashing winds, misfortunes). The English translator chooses on a steep path, both as a concrete structural and semantic equivalent of rebus in arduis, which retains closer meaning equivalence only between steep and arduus. But the Lithuanian translator gains in the metaphoric sense and in the totality of the image in this stanza. The important thing is that concrete nouns are preferred in English, which ensure analytic clarity in this language, while, in Lithuanian, abstract nouns can be retained like in Latin, for both Latin and Lithuanian are synthetic languages, in which the analytic clarity of concepts within the collocation is not important. Flexions fix syntactical relations and meaning instead.

In the English translation, path is a new word in the text and a concrete noun, while the Latin rebus is abstract. Therefore the inner bond of this collocation would be of interest semantically and verbally. Steep, which means ‘rising or falling sharply, not gradually’, is used in English of slopes, stairs and other surfaces. A steep path is recorded as a ready, probably, conventional collocation in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. It may be assumed, therefore, that analytic semantic relations are concealed by this fixed collocation. The meaning of steep, as defined above, combines wholly with path as with the word meaning a linear surface which may be characterised by a certain inclination. As a new word in the first line of the first stanza in the Ode under analysis, path would be unobtrusive, because the Latin arduum literally means ‘a steep place, a steep descent, something hardly manageable’, had the English translator not turned to the development of the image of path in the second line. In bonis does not mean ‘good going’; this meaning is only contextual in the English translation. This Latin prepositional collocation includes the plural Ablative of the adjective bonus and as a whole invokes the implied collocation rebus in bonis, which makes up an antithesis with rebus in arduis. The Lithuanian translator is more successful with sėkmėje (in success - the Locative singular of the abstract noun) as the equivalent of in bonis. Analytical semantics is obvious in the English translation, and these are largely questions of what is known as meaning equivalence. In this context, meaning equivalence extends from equivalent concepts over to their analytic clarity and concrete character in English. Thus analytic clarity seems to apply like a semantic universal to any text which is to be rendered in English.

We continue with the same line in the Ode under consideration, because the context of in bonis was ignored focusing merely on the antithetic phrases. The prepositional unit non secus in bonis consists of the adverb non secus which means ‘exactly so/also’. Its second part is the prepositional collocation in bonis which consists of the preposition in and the plural Ablative case of the adjective bonus. It literally means ‘in success’or ‘when success attends you’. The whole phrase may be literally translated as ‘in success also/too’. The English translator turns this unit of four words into a whole line because he has to paraphrase its meaning in accord with his own translation of the first line of the Ode. The Latin prepositional collocation in bonis demands this semantic adjustment. But, in addition to the semantic adjustment, the English translator is analytically explicit, that is why his equivalent phrase the same holds true when the going is good is so long: he uses even a verb to express the meaning of non secus in an analytically clear verbal phrase. In bonis also extends for him into an analytically explicit phrase of five words - when the going is good.

The Lithuanian translator is very brief because he uses an abstract noun, success, in the Locative singular (sėkmėje). Unlike in English, he can omit the verb in this collocation and just add an adverb. Thus, the Lithuanian translator is even literally close to the original and is as brief: o sėkmėje taip pat (while in success, too).

Lines 3 and 4 of the first stanza of the Third Ode, II, by Horace contain a prepositional phrase and apostrophy expressed by the first name with a modifier. The prepositional phrase ab insolenti temperatam laetitia consists of the preposition ab (from), the collocation insolenti laetitia in the Ablative singular (from too great joy) and the Accusative singular temperatam (moderate) which is in grammatical agreement with the singular Accusative noun mentem(mind/heart) (line 2). The whole phrase may be translated as ‘of too great joy beware’ or ‘keep your mind/heart temperate from too great joy’. Emphasising the relation of the phrase with mentem, the English translator hits upon a negative imperative forbidding happiness to make the man conceited. This is expressed by the English idiom go to your head in which the noun head is prominent, because the primary sense of the idiom is ‘to make one dizzy’, and this sense of the idiom may first of all apply rendering the meaning of the original. Though the English translator uses an abstract noun, happiness, not a concrete noun, joy, he is again analytically clear because of the concrete sense of the idiom. The idiom, in fact, reduces the poetic image of the imperative. The imperative is analytically clear but prosaic structurally.

The Lithuanian translator is more successful with the choice of the following equivalence: keeping close to the original, he uses the noun džiaugsmą (joy) in the Accusative singular and the verb suvaldyti (to manage) to express the transitivity of the phrase, and adds the imperative mokėk (know how) - mokėk džiaugsmą per didelį suvaldyti (know how to check too great joy). Thus translated into Lithuanian, this line is poetic and very much in accord with the total image of the original stanza. Comparing the two translations, we have to observe again analytic clarity in the English translation even though at the expense of the poetic image.

One more phrase in the English translation of Ode II.3 by Horace is rendered by an analytical description. This is the clause for you must die someday in line 4, which stands for moriture, where the Lithuanian has only one word mirtingas. But this is not a case of analytical semantics proper. It is a case of description in translation when a compact concept is missing in the target language. This case is exceptional only because the English description in the phrase ‘for you must die someday’ is distanced in meaning from the Latin text. It is concrete and fragmentary (or explicitly analytic) compared with the Latin moriture. This English equivalent is analogous to ‘a steady head on a steep path’, chosen as an equivalent to Aequam memento rebus in arduis in the first line of the same Ode. The latter English equivalent is starkly concrete and analytical in which a vaguely equivalent concrete concept is built up of separate words. It loses much of the poetic vagueness and generality of the concepts in the first line of the Ode in Latin.

To generalise on translations of different Latin texts, prose and poetry, by different translators into English and Lithuanian, the following is confirmed. Single words dominate in Latin as they do in good clear English. Compact Latin verbs and nouns are general in meaning and rch in sense. They are rendered while particularising their meaning by separate, concrete and functional English words in translation: si quid te adiuvero – ‘should some aid of mine’; curamve lavasso – ‘dispel the cares’; versat in pectore fixa –‘that now in thy bosom dwell’, etc. Such fragmentation of concepts (‘aid of mine’ for adiuvero, ‘in thy bosom’ for in pectore, ‘in these selfsame lines’ for versibus eisdem, ‘in which that man speaks to Flamininus’ for quibus adfatur Flamininum, ‘comfort for them’ for quarum consolatio, ‘friend Delius, for you must die someday’ for moriture Delli, ‘to take in sail when it swells in the wind that’s / a little too kind’ for contrabes vento nimium secundo / turgida vela, etc.) is predetermined by the syntax and morphology of English. Merely the linking words or conjunctions and prepositions segment concepts, which are general in Latin or Lithuanian, into marked constituent parts as if they were toy pieces. This is the explicit aspect of analytic clarity in English. The equivalent nouns and verbs are more concrete in English, as a rule, (‘your self-control and even the temper of your mind’ for moderationem animi tui et aequitatem, ‘on old age’ for de senectute, etc. ), which is again required by the analytical syntax of English and by the respective segmentation of the words.

Finally, it comes down to the analytic clarity of words in collocations. What inflexions perform and what permits to combine words in gradual lines in Latin ( aut iam urguentis aut certe adventantis senectutis) has to be fragmented and linked into descriptive combinations arranged by the principle of the proximity of immediate constituents (‘old age, which, if not already pressing hard upon us, is surely coming on apace’). Compact Latin words as in quidem id modice ac sapienter are split and arranged in attributive collocations: ‘with a calm and philosophic mind’. An attributive word combination of two words (+/- the article) is the best collocation in English because the flexionless words are in an immediate position to each other and the combination is lucid. But such word combinations replace compact Latin words regularly, not infrequently losing in poetic vagueness. This comparative consideration of the analytic clarity of the English equivalents in the English and Lithuanian translation of a Latin text must be considered exhausted. Once we have discovered analytic clarity in the translation of poetry, we can continue its search with more confidence in prose, in the referential use of English proper. The point of the analytic clarity of English and of analytical bonds in English collocations will be pursued further with reference to less noble texts.

One more point seems to be important in conclusion of the present analysis of the poetic text. This analysis of a fragment of De senectute by Cicero and of the Third Ode, II, by Horace confirms that analytic clarity is an active process in English. It features in translations of different works of different genres by different translators. Therefore it is possible to assume that analytic clarity extends over the referential use of English into other uses of this language and may be considered a law. Meaning is treated analytically in English overall, but it governs the referential use of English fundamentally. It is a general characteristic of English. English might be said to possess analytic semantics because syntax, morphology and word meaning in use contribute to it. Analytic clarity is most stringent in the word combination in English. It engages logic, analytic thinking, precision and accuracy in combining words. When collocations are conventional or selected by the frequency of their recurrence while resorting to the power of the linguistic instinct, this intensity of reasoning may not be too great. This is for the native speakers. The foreigner can never be relaxed when combining words in English as it engages his full intellectual potential, sensitivity and memory. It is intellectually arresting while writing and thinking and may exert its influence over the minds immersed in English texts and in communication. But this is a question of the closing section of the present chapter.

Although Latin is indispensable as a synthetic language for comparison with the analytic character of English, English translations of the classical texts have certain exceptional features. First, many classical texts do not represent the referential use of this language in the contemporary sense of the word even in prose. Second, translations of the classics have their own tradition, and the closest English equivalents of Latin collocations do not easily disclose an analytically perceivable bond. They are often fixed conventional collocations or idioms. Third, there exist several English translations of the same Latin texts and it is impossible to generalise with confidence when using only one translator’s work. Fourth, classical Latin has not lived through the age of mass media, and the crowded syntax which has developed in newspapers in modern synthetic languages, had no trace in Latin. Therefore, although ring-like structures in the syntax of synthetic Latin were current, classical Latin is considerably nobler than newspaper syntax today. Therefore synthetic languages from the mass media can more starkly expose the analytic character of English in comparison. Trying to confirm further the nature of analytic semantics in the referential use of English, I shall compare a Lithuanian text from information bulletins and its acceptable translation into English in the 1970s and 80s. Lithuanian texts of this character and of this period used to contain blown-up notions of success, merits and achievements, and their adequate translation into English invariably involved semantic analysis. Lithuanian is also a synthetic language, only much less widely understood, but, in the present case, is as useful for comparison as Latin. Since Lithuanian functioned through the period of boastful propaganda, it contained and developed muddled concepts (in addition to its synthetic complexity), which had to be stripped off of much of their abstract and synthetically complicated content to be adequately translated into English. Such mediocre texts will be an additional and a more obvious source of comparison with English than the noble classical texts with their grand notions which translators always preserved.

The text which has been chosen for analysis is an extract from an introduction of a Lithuanian playwright, Juozas Grušas, in a leaflet published for an international book fair in the 1970s. In it, the author of the text reviews significant features of the works of Juozas Grušas:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Juozas Grušas yra vienas iš dramos intelektualizavimo iniciatorių Lietuvoje; šiuolaikinëje lietuvių dramaturgijoje jo kūriniai ryškūs pirmiausia savo sintetiniu pasaulio suvokimu, plačiais filosofiniais apibendrinimais, problemų, į kurias autorius gilinasi su didele pilietine atsakomybe ir menine aistra, reikšmingumu. Grušą ypač domina žmogaus ryšiai su savo epocha, socialine aplinka ir jos pokyčiais, taip pat asmenybės santykis su socialinių ir etinių principų kaita didelių istorinių sukrėtimų metu. Daugelio jo dramų centre intelektualios asmenybės, apdovanotos sudėtingu dvasiniu pasauliu ir didelėmis aistromis. Jų likimas yra tiesiogiai veikiamas dramatinių vaizduojamos epochos ir mūsų amžiaus prieštaravimų. Ypač daug dėmesio autorius skiria vidiniams amžininko ieškojimams atskleisti. Nepaisant žanro ypatumų įvairovės, dramos formos požiūriu Grušo pjesės įkūnija klasikinės dramaturgijos ir šiuolaikinės dramos principų lydinį. Iš vienos pusës, autorius puoselėja tradicinį lietuvių dramaturgijai būdingą įvaizdžių iškilumą, griežtą vidinę struktūrą, herojų monumentalumą, ryškų jų likimų susipynimą. Iš kitos pusės, autorius remiasi psichologine įtampa, subtilia nuotaikų kaita, žodžio svarumu, sąlygine ir groteskine įvaizdžių įvairove ir kitomis priemonëmis, būdingomis šiuolaikinei literatūrai. Jo poetinėse istorinėse dramose aiškiai jaučiamas nervingas laiko pulsas ir problemų aktualumas, o jo šiuolaikinės tematikos kūriniuose - klasikinė aistrų įtampa, nepajudinama moralinių vertybių sistema ir dažnai tragiškas, bet iš esmės optimistinis kolizijų vystymasis.

Although this review is about a major Lithuanian dramatist, the words that are crowded into descriptive collocations are most of them abstract. The morphological and semantic relations within the collocations are hypotactical and so muddled that, viewing them with the structure of English in mind, they make one dizzy and unbalanced. I probably should have said that, because the text is about a major dramatist, an attempt has been made to compress as much praiseworthy information as possible, and the verbal expression is overcrowded and confused. Whichever the case, the text structurally is mind blowing. Its acceptable English version runs as follows:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

J.G. is one of the Lithuanian pioneer playwrights who focuses extensively on intellectual content in drama. Among the works of other contemporary Lithuanian dramatists, his plays impress one by their global grasp of reality, the breadth of their philosophical vision and by the significance of the problems which the author treats with patriotic concern and sophisticated passion. The relation of man to the events of his time, to his changing milieu, and the stand of the individual in the face of the clash of social and ethical principles at the crucial moments in history are of major interest to J.G. The central characters in most of his dramas are passionate individuals endowed with powerful spirit. Their destiny is strongly influenced by the dramatic conflicts of the age and by those of the modern world. The author’s concern, however, basically reflects the search of his characters as they struggle with issues of conscience. Despite a variety of peculiarities of the genre, G’s plays display a blend of the principles of the classical and modern drama. On the one hand, the author adopts the noble images typical of Lithuanian classical drama, its rigid formal structure, majestic personages and a distinct interdependence of their several destinies. On the other hand, G. draws on the intense psychological setting, subtle and finely-wrought changes of mood, weighty phraseology, an abundance of conventional and grotesque images and other devices so typical of modern literature. In his poetic historical dramas, the strain of the epoch and the urgency of its problems are perceivable, while his plays on contemporary themes retain the classical collisions and passions, an unshakeable system of moral values, and an often tragic, yet essentially optimistic resolution of the conflicts.

As a translator and one of the editors of this English version of the text, I feel competent enough to comment on the equivalent choice and on the analytical process of thought that was part of the translation procedure. Although the projection of the structure of the sentence may be important and although the synthetically built-in structures obscure syntactical relations in the Lithuanian text, the adjustment of structural equivalence is not a major difficulty in translation. The knotted hypotactical relations among words in clauses in Lithuanian have to be straightened out in the English text first. For example:

Ypač daug dėmesio autorius skiria vidiniams amžininko ieškojimams atskleisti

(sentence 5). The structure of this Lithuanian sentence includes the direct object, used initially, with an attributive modifier in the Genitive singular (ypač daug dėmesio), the subject (autorius) in the Nominative singular, the predicate (skiria) in the Present Indefinite and a complex object phrase (vidiniams amžininko prieštaravimams atskleisti), which consists of an attribute (vidiniams) in the Dative plural, an attribute (amžininko) in the Genitive singular, the object word (ieškojimams) in the Dative plural and a verb in the complex object (atskleisti), which is the infinitive. The government and semantic relations are as indicated graphically. This sentence contains three instances of attributive relations in immediate positions, which are shown by the first two short arrows on the left and one tiny subjugated arrow towards the right. The first short arrow explicates a more or less consecutive arrangement of the words in the initial attributive phrase (Ypač daug dėmesio = especially much attention). The immediate attributive relations in the phrase (amžininko ieškojimams= for searchings of the contemporary ) are subjugated under the cross relations between another modifying attribute (vidiniams= inner ), the meaning of which belongs not only to the object word (ieškojimams = for searchings ) but also to another attribute (amžininko= of the contemporary ). The syntactical relations so encircled over the several words are neither linearly distributed, nor analytical nor clear. Therefore the meaning of the phrase has a certain vagueness, especially that two words (vidiniams ieškojimams = for inner searchings) are rather abstract. One forked and one long arrow in the drawing on the right show how syntactical relations among the words intersect, how distantly the modifying words are placed even in attributive relations and how the sense of the modifying words runs into the object word (ieškojimams = for searchings) backed by the grammatical meaning of the inflections. The verb (skiria= dedicates) reaches over to the infinitive (atskleisti = to reveal) in the complex object phrase and since the meaning of the enclosed attributive phrase (vidiniams amžininko ieškojimams = for the inner searchings of the contemporary) also partly belongs to the infinitive (atskleisti= to reveal), the vagueness of the second part of this sentence increases.

The enclosed links in the phrase on the right have to be rearranged in translation into English, even if the initial phrases in this sentence require less reconstruction in English. This sentence may be and has been rendered in a marginally complicated SVO indO indO structure in English. This would be a fairly simple process of grammatical adjustment if the projected syntactical relations did not collapse because of the semantic content of the collocations in English or if the projected syntactical relations did not have to be reconsidered depending on the semantics of lexical equivalents finally decided upon. Thus, the synthetically entangled syntactic and semantic relations in the above sentence may be first straightened out into quite an ordinary structure. For example: The author’s concern, however, lies basically in the reflection of the inner searchings of the contemporary of his age. But this English sentence is unacceptable for its vocabulary: most of it is yet abstract and unusual in the syntax. The meaning of the whole sentence, too, is yet very much entangled and unusual in English. Leaving off the semantic adjustment of this sentence for a later stage in this consideration, it is necessary to note that the syntax of Lithuanian is less complicated only in a few sentences of the text.

Thus the initially chosen straight syntactical equivalents in English had to be, indeed, reconsidered almost in every sentence. The lexical equivalents finally decided upon required it. But the choice of lexical equivalents meant a considerable process of analysis because the Lithuanian abstractions had to be taken to pieces and then assembled again in a different guise. This analysis was in fact the process of the search of equivalents between the synthetically knit collocations and the analytically clear collocations. This is what this semantic analysis is about.

Some of the problematic collocations from the Lithuanian text will be considered here in turn. The process of the analytical treatment of Lithuanian collocations involves a certain strategy. The idea is to translate the Lithuanian text altering it so that it acquires the maximum of the analytic clarity of the concepts in English. The target thus becomes located between suitable conventional English collocations, on the one hand, and new collocations which are analytically clear or even have an analytically traceable semantic bond, on the other.

To begin with sentence 1 in the Lithuanian text and the problematic collocation, vienas iš dramos intelektualizavimo iniciatorių, in it. This collocation literally translates as one of the pioneers who initiated the intellectualisation of drama. A closer scrutiny of this phrase suggests that something is wrong with the emphasis of degree in it. Since the matter of initiating combined with a qualifier ‘one of the first’ tends to be an excessive statement, the word initiated is dismissed altogether at the start. Then the point is to discover what may be intellectual about drama that could be rendered in a comprehensible English collocation. The choice falls on the noun content because intellectual content sounds like a reasonable English collocation: content as the substance of a play can combine with the adjective intellectual by virtue of this adjective having the meaning ‘of the intellect’ which may qualify the content of a work. The collocation has also an antonym emotive content, which makes it all the more likely in English. Finally, The Word Finder by Rodale records the collocation intellectual content as probable in English. The question of the central concept in the above collocation thus becomes resolved. It remains problematic, however, what should be done with the first author and with his initiative. Having decided that the noun pioneer should suffice to convey the meaning of ‘pioneers who initiated’, the verb focus is chosen as a word which means major attention given to something. The emphasis confirming this idea may be expressed by the adverb extensively, for example. Thus, the following statement comes to be wrought out of all the concepts chosen analytically: J.G. is one of the Lithuanian pioneer playwrights who focuses extensively on intellectual content in drama.

The second clause in sentence 1 contains even three abstract concepts, the last of which is extended by an attributive clause with two more abstract concepts in it. The first clause jo kūriniai ryškūs ... savo sintetiniu pasaulio suvokimu (literally - his works distinguish themselves by the synthetic grasp of the world) is turned into ...his plays impress one by their global grasp of reality. Global grasp is acceptable in English because grasp, which here means perception/understanding, can combine with the adjective global, which, in its turn, means ‘concerning or affecting the whole world’. Thus, the noun grasp is qualified as all-embracing. Moreover, the collocation the global grasp partly attracts the concept of the world, which is wrongly used in Lithuanian, meaning the object of the author’s grasp. The point is that the target of the dramatist can be the grasp of reality rather than the grasp of the world, because the word world in English means ‘the universe; time, state or scene of human existence, human affairs, active life; material things and occupations as contrasted with spiritual ones; everybody and everything’. The noun world, thus, is too concrete and broad a word in English to be used as an objective of an imaginative writer.

The second abstract collocation in sentence 1 plačiais filosofiniais apibendrinimais literally means broad philosophical generalisations. On its analytical scrutiny, the collocation is turned into the breadth of their (i.e. the works’)philosophical vision. Philosophical vision is chosen as an acceptable collocation in English because vision figuratively means ‘ability to view a subject, problem, etc. imaginatively’. Such a view can be qualified by the adjective philosophical by virtue of its meaning ‘of search for knowledge and understanding of nature and of human life’ and ‘of an outlook on life that is a guiding prinicple for behaviour’.

The third abstract homogeneous concept ‘significance’ is not very problematic, but the notions in the attached attributive clause are. They are pilietinė atsakomybė (= civic/patriotic responsibility) and meninė aistra(= artistic passion) and are used as indirect objects. Both literally translate as patriotic responsibility and artistic passion, respectively. Responsibility is discarded in the first collocation to replace it by the abstract noun concern acceptable in this collocation in English by virtue of its meaning ‘worry and thing that is important or interesting to somebody’. The word in both senses can combine with the adjective patriotic in English. Moreover, it partly covers the concept ‘responsibility’. Thus, patriotic concern is the result of this analysis. (Patriotic rather than civic is retained here because ‘patriotism’ was a permanent and sacred ideal in the 1970s in the Soviet Union, as it is now.) In the second collocation, the adjective artistic is discarded, because passion cannot be related to the possession of natural skills in the fine arts or to the production with skill and good taste, both of which are the senses of the adjective artistic. Passion can be qualified by certain features, some of which may be extraordinary, deep, exquisite, intense, original, sophisticated, etc. Having considered these modifiers, sophisticated passion was chosen as an equivalent of ‘the passion of the artist’, which literally had identified with artistic passion in the Lithuanian. The chosen collocation may mean both the artist’s natural taste and his boundless temperament, which together may, supposedly, produce refinement or sophistication. In this sense sophisticated passion is an analytically clear equivalent of the clumsy Lithuanian artistic passion.

Sentence 2 demands detailed analysis in translation, too. The length of this sentence depends on the extended homogeneous parts: Grušą ypač domina žmogaus ryšiai su savo epocha, socialine aplinka ir jos pokyčiais, taip pat asmenybės santykis su socialinių ir etinių principų kaita didelių istorinių sukrėtimų metu. This sentence has the inverted word order, with the direct object Grušą in the Accusative singular used at the beginning. The emphatically modified predicate ypač domina in the passive is followed by two extended subject groups: žmogaus ryšiai su savo epocha, socialine aplinka ir jos pokyčiais (literally: the relations of man to his epoch, his social environment and the changes going on in it) and asmenybės santykis su socialinių ir etinių principų kaita didelių istorinių sukrėtimų metu (literally: the stand of the individual in the face of the changes of social and ethical principles at crucial moments in history).

Both the extended subject groups denote the objects which are of interest to the playwright. In both cases it is relations which are stated mainly between abstract things. In the first phrase, it is man’s relations with his time, which does not make sense in English if translated literally. In addition to it, man’s relations with his social environment and its changes is included in the first subject group. This sounds best in English when cut by half because literal equivalence (e.g, social environment) would be strange in English. Man’s relation with his milieu and its changes have to be blended into one (to his changing milieu) as the noun relations makes the sentence devoid of any perceivable sense and of any compulsory semantic relations between the words in the collocation. Even so, sentence 3 in this text is too long and obscure compared with Lady Stenton’s English above. The rendering of the second subject group, which contains a statement about relations of the individuality (man for some reason has been turned into an individuality), with the changes in social and ethical principles at crucial moments in history, is at first sight above one. First, man’s name as it is has to be restored and the noun individuality cut because this abstraction seems funny if one imagines its function as that of the active subject in English. Second, the relations have to be sorted out.

Analysing concepts under the noun relations, it appears that man’s conceivable relations might be with the events of his time rather than with ‘the epoch’, which translates neither literally nor distorts the Lithuanian text. Such periphrasis only adds clarity. The second kind of relations ‘with his social environment’ might go for a single word milieu. Since changes in the social environment were also mentioned, the phrase might be contracted into the following: the relation of man to the events of his time and his changing milieu, which so far is analytically clear in English. All the words are obvious, and semantic analysis would only confirm the lucidity of the words’ syntactical relations in the collocations.

One more clause from the extended subject group has to be tackled. It is asmenybės santykis su socialinių ir etinių principų kaita didelių istorinių sukrėtimų metu (literally: the stand of the individuality in the face of the changes of social and ethical principles at crucial moments in history). As I have mentioned, asmenybė (i.e. individuality) should go in favour of the simple noun man or individual. As a plain and active subject, this abstract noun will never do in English. That is the first point which gives a concrete start. The second point is that of man’s role rather than relations in the face of the clash of principles when crucial developments take place in history. It is in these concepts that the clause has to be phrased rather than in those given in the Lithuanian text to make English comprehensible.

First, to settle the syntactical relations, an overall passive construction should be employed to have an extended subject group at the beginning of the sentence in English. It would also help to place the direct object Grušą in the Accusative singular in Lithuanian, in sentence final position in English to confirm its syntactical function expressed by the preposition to. This structure is definitely acceptable in English because it preserves the regular SVO pattern. The extended subject groups should be beaten into shape following observations on the sense and structure as mentioned above. Thus, finally, the sentence can be as neat as the following: The relation of man to the events of his time, to his changing milieu, and the stand of the individual in the face of the clash of social and ethical principles at the crucial moments in history are of major interest to Juozas Grušas. All the collocations are either semantically or extralinguistically motivated in this sentence, and the abstractions with their obscurity are gone.

Analytical treatment helps to manage sentence 3 in translation, too. This sentence is about “intellectual individuals endowed with rich spiritual world and great passions” and these individuals are central in J.G. dramas. In translating this sentence, “intellectual individuals” have gone because the author’s focus on intellectual content of his plays has been emphasised earlier. Instead, the second half of the sentence with two homogeneous objects, which literally translates as “endowed with complicated spiritual world and great passions”, was cut into two: passions as the object was turned into an attribute to produce passionate individuals, while endowment was limited to spirit to produce endowed with powerful spirit. The word world, which was used originally in the collocation the spiritual world, was discarded because this word denotes everything connected with exterior reality, as, for instance, everything that exists. That is why the collocation is odd. Besides, the word world has no figurative sense to refer to spirit. On the contrary, it excludes spirit, because it refers to the material world and the respective occupations in all its senses. Therefore the second part of the sentence was turned into an extended predicative and translated as follows: passionate individuals endowed with powerful spirit. The complete sentence, thus, runs: The central characters in most of his dramas are passionate individuals endowed with powerful spirit.

Sentence 4 is very much in the abstract. However, since it is about the influence on and the shaping of the fictitious characters it was not drastically altered. In the English translation, the passive construction of the sentence was retained but the analytic clarity of the key words was sought. The sentence may be literally translated in the following way: ‘Their destiny is directly influenced by the dramatic contradictions of the epoch and those of the present age’. In an analytical scrutiny, one’s mind stumbles over contradictions which can influence, over direct influence on the characters and over the epochs and their identity. Clear thinking resists the concepts and relations in literal translation. Leaving the subject-predicate group at first untouched, the actor in the passive construction dramatic contradictions is altered. It is turned into the dramatic conflicts which is concrete and therefore clear. Besides, it is a conventional collocation with the bond between sudden and exciting in dramatic and opposition in conflicts keeping the words close together.

The following step is to fix the identity of the epochs which produce the conflicts. ‘The epoch’ which identifies with the time in drama comes to be called the age, with the definite article making it specific for the play. ‘The present age’ is changed into the modern world to emphasise the world as a source of conflicts and to identify it with the present time. Finally, direct influence appears somewhat doubtful because it is metaphoric in sense: fictitious characters cannot be directly influenced either by the age or by the modern world. What is more, direct in this collocation may be merely emphatic. Thus, to comply with clear thinking, direct influence is discarded to use strongly influenced instead. This slight alteration in sense is not a major flaw because the word strongly alters the sense only a little. Using it, one gains literal sense which is important. Thus, finally, sentence 4 is straightened out into the following: Their destiny is strongly influenced by the dramatic conflicts of the age and by those of the modern world.

Sentence 5, which was used above to illustrate the entangled syntax of Lithuanian, is problematic because of the collocation vidiniams amžininko ieškojimams atskleisti. This is a complex object in the sentence and it literally translates as: “to reveal the inner searching of his contemporary”. Having chosen the verbal phrase The author’s concern basically reflects as the principal clause in the sentence, one has to disentangle the collocation “the inner searchings” which is meaningless in English. What is meant by this collocation is deep thought given to one’s feelings, actions and motives. This is very close to the sense of the formal idiom to search one’s heart/conscience, and the initial idea was to use the idiom. It could not be employed intact, however, and the periphrasis of the idiom was not very successful. But the periphrasis led to the choice of a new sentence structure, which projected into a nominal phrase with a subordinate clause. The direct object to follow the verb reflects was formed of the nouns search and characters to produce the search of his characters, which is an ordinary collocation, clear and simple. The subordinate clause, then, with the verb struggle in the active voice and the prepositional phrase with issues of conscience was a simple and obvious explanatory structure: The author’s concern, however, basically reflects the search of his characters as they struggle with issues of conscience. Merely the final subordinate clause shows how linear syntactical relations in English gain clarity over the ring-like syntax of Lithuanian.

Skipping sentences 6-8, I shall focus on a problematic sentence, which is sentence 9. It is a long sentence and it has to be taken in parts. The principal clause in sentence 9, which contains a metaphor in Lithuanian ascribed to time, the famous abstract notion, is far from simple to translate. This is the clause Jo poetinėse istorinėse dramose aiškiai jaučiamas nervingas laiko pulsas ir problemų aktualumas... It literally translates as “In his poetic historical dramas, the nervous pulse of time is felt and the urgency of its problems...” To tackle “the nervous pulse of time”, one has to strip it off of the metaphorical sense and of time, and convey the idea simply by the noun strain combined with another noun epoch in an of-phrase. The choice of these concrete words had been prompted by the silly Lithuanian metaphor quoted above. The idea of the translator was, first, to mention how one’s mental and physical abilities are taxed, as this appears to be caused by the epoch. This, in fact, had been the sense of the metaphor. Leaving the abstract noun urgency to qualify the problems of the age, the above sentence can be straightened out into the following: In his poetic historical dramas, the strain of the epoch and the urgency of its problems are perceivable...

The second clause in sentence 9 is elliptical in Lithuanian with the verb in the passive is felt implied. Since the verb is felt has been discarded and the idea rendered by are perceivable in the first clause, a verb has to be found for the use in the second clause because this clause is too long to be managed with ellipsis. The second clause is about J.G.’s plays on contemporary themes and their features. Treating the second clause as an independent syntactical unit, the plays on contemporary themes, which are expressed by an adverbial modifier of place in Lithuanian, are turned into the subject. The verb retain is used as the predicate in the second clause of sentence 9. This verb covers the meaning of perceivable and opens up a perspective for the classical features of the plays.

Since there are at least three features of the plays on contemporary themes and since all of them are expressed by abstract words, care must be taken to render them comprehensively in English. A simple enumeration of the features in Lithuanian simplifies their rendering in English. The first feature is “the classical tension of passions” in literal translation. This collocation is rephrased into one with two homogeneous objects the classical tension and passions. The second feature is an unshakeable system of moral values, which remains thus worded. The third feature of the plays is tragic collisions which are resolved optimistically. It is altered in translation. Thus, the second clause in sentence 9 in the Lithuanian text acquires the following expression in English: ..., while his plays on contemporary themes retain the classical tension and passions, an unshakeable system of moral values, and often tragic, yet essentially optimistic resolution of the conflicts.

This clause, thus, preserves clear logic because all the homogeneous objects expressed by nouns combine with the verb retain. The attributive collocations (the classical tension, an unshakeable system, moral values and an essentially optimistic resolution) are acceptable in English: they are either conventional (moral values) or close to the conventional (an unshakeable system, cf.: an infallible system; optimistic resolution, cf.: satisfactory/chivalrous resolution). Some explicitness of the bond may be traced in the collocations, too. For example, a system of moral values as a group of moral principles working together as a whole may be characterised by a degree of its tightness. Unshakeable as an adjective denoting something that cannot be changed or is absolutely firm implies the highest degree of tightness in the system. Therefore the collocation an unshakeable system of moral values may be said to have a semantically motivated bond denoting the tightness of the system.

A vague motivation of the bond in the collocation optimistic resolution may also be traced. The abstract noun resolution denotes here the act of settling problems. Plain logic permits one to believe that such an act may be qualified by a certain manner. Although the action itself cannot be optimistic, the settling of problems may be qualified by the adjective optimistic which means the expectation of the best. Thus, optimistic resolution means the settling of conflicts with the expectation of the best. Though I have no grounds to prove that the collocation optimistic resolution does not violate the linguistic instinct of the native speaker, I can at least show that it does not violate logic and that it has a vaguely semantically motivated bond. One of the collocations in the clause under consideration (the classical tension and passions) is extralinguistically motivated. It means such tension and passions as known from the classics. Since none of so many attributive collocations in the enumeration can shock the native speaker by their arbitrariness, they may be acceptable in the English translation. They indeed were found acceptable by the editor who was a native speaker.

It is clear that the translator of this text had to tackle the ideology of the time to an extent, but the problem of structural and semantic equivalence has hopefully been shown. As may have become obvious from the above analysis, the ring-like structures of Lithuanian, which are kept together by the inflections, are taken to pieces and reassembled in transitive constructions, of-phrases or in attributive collocations of two or three words. But it was not abstract words as such that were discarded in English. Abstract words also have a role to play in this language. It was primarily relations between the words within the collocation that were of significance. The problem is that the synthetic language, which is Lithuanian, permits the speaker to use collocations in which semantic relations are obscured beyond measure or are absent altogether. When such collocations involve abstract words, it is only the system of flexions in the synthetic language that ensures the sense and functioning of such collocations. The simplest question about semantic relations within the collocation indicates when such relations are vague and when the deep semantic bond is absent in the collocation. When Lithuanian collocations are treated analytically, part of their content comes to be discarded in translation because it is either absent or emotively emphatic, which is actually no loss at all. It has to be added that the structural complexity and ring-like syntax in Lithuanian is the result of the influence of the language of the modern media.

The functioning of obscure collocations in Lithuanian implies the complexity of syntactical relations with the respective vagueness of sense and the potential influence of this language on the mind of its speakers. There may be reasons for the semantic obscurity of Lithuanian. Viewing Lithuanian texts in the referential use of language retrospectively, one can suppose that the former political status, the character of the language and a lack of dictionaries of usage contributed to an increase of abstract words and the vagueness of Lithuanian, which partly depends on the character of this language. At least the currency of abstract words and of blown-up concepts was an issue in question: such words could not have been used well without the dictionaries.

The process of thinking and analysis as illustrated is permanent when one takes on reverse translation of a Lithuanian text in the referential use of language from the sphere of culture and social sciences. It is not only the division of concepts that takes place. As has been mentioned, in this process of semantic analysis, whole phrases may come to be discarded from the Lithuanian text, for example, because they mean either nothing or their content becomes covered by the neighbouring words. For example: Šiais metais diplomus gavo daugiau kaip 2,000 specialistų su aukštuoju išsilavinimu. The point in this sentence is the phrase following the figure, which literally means “professionals with higher education”. The idea of the sentence is that there were over 2,000 of these ‘professionals’ in the given year and that they received diplomas. When the sharpened mind scans such a sentence in Lithuanian, it cuts all “professionals with higher education” and turns them into higher school graduates. Thus, the sentence becomes the following English equivalent: Over 2,000 higher school graduates received diplomas this year. Similarly, the sentence Jokiame kitame salone nerasite tiek medicinos išsilavinimą turinčių specialistų (literally: In no other beauty parlour you will find so many specialists with professional medical education) is normally translated as: There is no other beauty parlour in V., which employs so many medical doctors. What medical doctors means is clumsily put in four words in Lithuanian because three abstract words in the phrase sound, supposedly, very impressive and important. The meaning, however, is plain. What is meant is no more than a medical doctor.

To generalise on what has been said analytically, one has to state that the English language, as it functions in the referential use today, has analytic clarity preserved in one-to-one conceptual links not only in clauses but especially in its collocations practised with such precision that the mind of a speaker or a translator has to be adequately sharpened to express itself with acceptable equivalence in speech or translation. The straightened out structural equivalence of English as compared with the hypotactical or ring-like structure of the phrase in synthetic languages is only the starting point in expression. The essential thing is to be conscious of propositional structure and transitivity in the English sentence, and of the phrase while completing it with precise and analytically connected words. This conceptual precision or analytic clarity that is preserved between English words in the referential use of language together with the logic of the sentence may be called analytic semantics here. It remains to add that analytic semantics features in all uses of English, as the analysis of the Ode by Horace has illustrated above. It may with confidence be called the identity feature of English.

The mind of the native speaker does not function with as explicit rationale as this consideration has shown. The linguistic instinct performs the function for him. But native speakers are aware of the clarity of their own English. They become especially sensitive when they encounter the muddled speech of the foreigners and start resisting its acceptability. One brief evaluation which appeared in the media is especially notable. It was over the BBC World Service in early 1989 that a translation of the novel Searching for Solace was commented upon. The appreciation was brief but it ended in a notable remark on the language of the translation. It was said to consist “of impossibly rambling sentences, ranging from abstraction to abstraction”. “...but it’s dreadful English” was the conclusion over the BBC World Service.

The analytic clarity of English, (i.e. analytically clear concepts in word meaning and motivated one-to-one relations of words in collocations), forms a principle for verbal options and collocations. This feature is not entirely new, only detailed in the present study of the use of English and in a comparative study of three languages. The requirement to be clear and concrete in one’s words has recurred in stylistics.There is not perhaps a stylist in English who did not prescribe brevity and clarity as the principal dicta of good style and pleasing language. To my knowledge, a list of the names of those authors who appreciated clarity and concrete words may be endless (cf., for example: Bradley, 1919, 219; Fulcher, 1927, 7-8; Brooks and Warren, 1950; Lucas, 1955, 47, 65-68, 177, 237; Warner, 1964, 181 et passim; Strunk, 1972, 71-72; Gowers, 1977, 14-18; Pinckert, 1981, 217-225; Payne, 1982, 15). The fact that clarity matters not only in good style but also in the acceptability of the referential use of English becomes evident from documents of international organisations. As the Minutes of EURALEX Biennial General Meeting held in Tampere on August 8, 1992, had it, one of the criteria for the submission of papers for EURALEX Congresses were to be “clarity of thought and presentation”; moreover, a warning was issued that “the quality of linguistic presentation would be considered separately”.

The question of concrete words is a significant point. My lengthy analysis of Latin and Lithuanian texts explains, among other things, why concrete words are praised in English. I hope I have shown in my analysis that two things matter in the expression of meaning in English: it is linearity or transitivity in the sentence and one-to-one links between overtly or covertly related words in collocations. It is concrete words that make such relations not only possible but rather simple and inevitable while bypassing any explanations. Therefore the known and accepted rule to this day is “Prefer the concrete word to the abstract” (Fowler, 1994, 15). Three other rules given by the same author (Prefer the single word to the circumlocution, Prefer the short word to the long and Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance) (Fowler, 1994, 15-17) support the first rule in different ways.

My comparative analysis and the consideration of the analytic clarity of English with known references in stylistics simultaneously highlight the criterion of delicacy in word meaning and in verbal options. Delicacy is predetermined by the potential meaning of English and is a feature of the use of language overall. Indeed, delicacy features in linguistic theory. It is M.A.K.Halliday who has introduced the concept of delicacy as a scale of abstraction (among rank, exponence, and delicacy) in the theory of grammar (Halliday, 1976, 70). He has also had a very notable remark on the vocabulary when he said in particular that “the lexicon … is simply the most delicate grammar” (Halliday, 1978, 43). This draws attention, in its turn, to the significance of the language user’s sense for the delicate shades of meaning. This question matters in Chapters 6, 7 and 8 in the present paper.

Different factors exercise influence on the use of English and preserve clarity and delicacy in it.

English dictionaries have a role to play in the clarity of English, and the concerned can profit enormously by them. Excluding Romance words, the definitions of the meaning of which are single Germanic or more common Romance words, the definitions of word meaning in other cases follow the pattern of succinct and clear statements in English explanatory dictionaries. The definitions in English dictionaries are so well structured and informative that English dictionaries happen to come to rescue in arguments when relevant dictionaries are lacking even in other languages. When writing English, too, exact definitions of the words not only confirm the acceptability of the word but may prompt an equivalent in case of necessity. The mind which is used to refer to the dictionaries for definitions may happen to be in dire need of them in arguments or their resolutions. I well remember a case of my students’ discussion which followed when one of the students stated that “Pablo was dangerous” in Chapter 5 in the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. The problem was that the student had to have been inaccurate in reading or in wording her thoughts. She, then, slipped in using the word but was too absent-minded to sense the error: had she used another word instead of dangerous, there would have been no discussion. She might have said, “Pablo had made the others suspicious of him”. The expression having been as it is, a discussion was inevitable, but, to conclude it, I badly required an exact definition of the words danger and dangerous. Happily, The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary was within reach and was referred to. The definition, which ran as follows: “chance of suffering damage, loss, injury; person or thing that may cause injury, pain, etc., hazard”, which was not true of Pablo in Chapter 5 in the novel, not only resolved the discussion proving the student’s error in the choice of the word. It also set the teacher’s mind at rest that her intuitive notion of the definition of the word had been correct. The Dictionary appeared to be a living body and a companion to the foreigner in the classroom.

Analytical and precise definitions in English explanatory dictionaries well guide the user when a word is required to produce an acceptable collocation. Moreover, precisely analytically segmented word meaning in English trains the mind so that it starts rejecting all muddled speech in all languages one knows. It is difficult to overestimate the perfection of the definitions in monolingual English dictionaries: they train the mind so that even a foreigner can acquire the readiness of response in education and the ability to lead in arguments, even if he has no sparkling wit. Thus, we have come to the point of the influence of the referential use of English on the mind.

The Influence of the Referential Use of English on the Mind

What has been said in the previous paragraph takes us directly to the question of the influence of the referential use of English on the mind. Few other languages have so precisely expressed and so explicitly employed analytic semantics, so when I speak of the influence of the referential use of language, it will not be a general consideration. I shall speak of the influence of the analytically based expression of meaning in the referential use of English on thought and the mind.

Mental processes a result of which is the analytic clarity of English, on the one hand, and a disciplined analytically functioning mind under the influence of the language, on the other, do not develop at once and of their own. In the case of the native speakers, they are the result of a life time of a person and of the language. In the case of foreigners using English as a foreign language, the processes are not so long and thorough, but a dedicated learner of English can experience the influence of English on his mind. To achieve this, conscious efforts of the foreign speaker of English are required through quite a long period of time. The initial stage of it ends in the awareness of the clarity of the referential use of English. It is accompanied by conscious and most favourable appreciation of the pleasing beauty of such lucidity. It is also a pleasure to the mind when it resolves all questions clearly and so completely. This happens in the advanced adult student’s years at university. Most gifted and conscientious university graduates and postgraduates experience pleasure and joy on encountering succinct English collocations and relatively short sentences or when they themselves manage to produce them. A reaction at this stage is to collect such collocations and memorise them so that they could be used in case of necessity. This is the accumulating stage of the language matter. Students do not advance further than their ability to recognise samples of the best English. This is so because language matter on which their mind operates is yet scarce, and students encounter difficulty in their attempt to judge which words may go together when new collocations have to be produced. They can only recognise the best expression and appreciate it. Even postgraduates after some six years of English studies at university do not have a ready linguistic instinct to produce acceptable new collocations in translating into English or writing English. University postgraduates resort heavily to the dictionaries which do not exclude bilingual dictionaries. The use of bilingual dictionaries at this stage is a major drawback because such dictionaries interfere with a steady formation of the linguistic instinct for English as a foreign language.

The orientation to memorise and reproduce the best collocations, conventional and free, is the right direction, however. Familiarity with such collocations in great numbers becomes a partial substitute for a lack of the linguistic instinct of the student. The target at this stage of knowledge of English as a foreign language is the conventional collocation, its reproduction or a maximum approximation to it.

At this stage, the best samples of the referential use of English perform the polishing function of the mind in addition to the accumulating function. When failing to express oneself sufficiently clearly, the student’s sense of frustration is combined with the sense of pity for oneself: how can one remain unmoved when there exist volumes of texts in excellent referential use of English, while the student has to put up with his own inefficiency.

The determined and really interested university postgraduate finds himself in a transitory stage when his linguistic instinct becomes active. The postgraduate cannot yet cope fully with the mental discipline and his own verbal resources in English. He finds it difficult to manage the syntax and analytic semantics of English equally well. When he takes up translation into English from his native language, false collocations keep appearing and the analytic clarity of English is not yet irrefutable. But this is a stage to keep on.

A really devoted foreign learner of English gradually reaches a still higher stage in his mastery of English as a foreign language. This is the stage when the mind is sufficiently equipped with language matter and the bilingual dictionaries are scarcely necessary if at all. This stage is normally reached by the foreign speaker of English who holds academic degrees. At this stage the foreign speaker’s experience includes familiarity with English in different uses and with English literature in different styles, profound knowledge of English grammar and rational or intuitive discovery of the analytic clarity of English. The verbal matter of English in the mind of the foreign speaker at this stage is profound. He can translate from his native language into English and write himself with resort only to monolingual English dictionaries. He seeks information on the exact definitions of word meanings, synonyms and the potential value of English words in collocations. Although the foreign user of English can never attain the linguistic instinct of the native speaker, his proficiency at this stage of knowledge is almost satisfactory. He can not only speak and write English and translate into English with some confidence, but he can also experience pleasure at his own ability to cope with English as a foreign language and make it acceptable. This pleasure does not derive from complacency or conceit. It is the pleasure which the clarity and orderliness of English render.

These observations on the development of competence in English as a foreign language have been made at the University of Vilnius. About thirty students and teachers have been observed and the development of their proficiency in English as a foreign language has been assessed in twenty five years. Though these figures are not staggering, the assessment of the quality of their skills in English and of their intellectual potential has been done carefully. Moreover, some general observations have been made on the influence of the referential use of English on the mind.

The specific concerns and functions of the mind at an advanced level of proficiency in English as a foreign language can be consciously perceived and described. The mental processes which lend themselves to description would be the following: conscious and semiconscious analytical treatment of words and concepts, the search of precise word meanings and of precision in expression, constant comparison of the words and collocations chosen for expression with the conventional collocations in English, and the intuitive test of the acceptability of collocations and statements in English. It is important to remember that one is aware of these processes in the mind when one has reached a high level of proficiency in English as a foreign language under the influence of the best referential use of English. But the mental processes mentioned above are interrelated and rarely if ever can be perceived as separate functions. They are usually simultaneous and, in the brief description that follows, they will be treated separately for the mere division of labour.

Conscious analytical treatment of words and concepts has been illustrated when translations of Latin and Lithuanian texts into English were analysed above. It is the mental process when the mind, influenced by the clarity of the referential use of English, attempts to segment almost every word and collocation to discover the ultimate and unobscured concepts which may be traced behind the words in the target language. At least all abstract words without exception are subjected to such mental scanning. Concrete words are also treated analytically in the sense that the mind seeks as concrete equivalents, permanently testing whether the concrete equivalents will satisfy a probable syntactical structure in English. In this process, one encounters such circumstances when the structural requirements of English exclude certain concrete words or reveal that they are absent in English. In such cases mental analytical treatment of words in the source language may extend over to the analysis of the things and processes in extralinguistic reality to find out what equivalents in English as the target language may truthfully and realistically agree with the words in the source language. When the analytical treatment of words and processes becomes so detailed, even structural changes may happen to be made in English as the target language and the initial choice of the syntactical structure changed. In this process, the mind analytically segments words in the source language to trace the ultimate unobscured notions behind the words so that the maximum verbal precision could be achieved and the content would not be distorted. That is why this process is called conscious analytical treatment of words and concepts. This process is so profound that it may take place in the deeper recesses of the mind and may remain beyond one’s full awareness. That is why I mentioned it both as conscious and semiconscious. But mental analysis of words and concepts does go on because it is an integral part of the semantics of English and because it is the only way to ensure comprehension in English as the target language.

A search of precise words and of general precision in expression is closely related to the process of the mental analysis of words and concepts, which has just been considered. It is actually the same process. It is only reversed because equivalent words have to be found for the words in the source language and the unobscured concepts behind them. But the search of precise word meanings is a more extensive process, and the user of English as a foreign language is consciously aware of it. Whole strings of words as probable choices are tried mentally at the speed of light and discarded until the right one is found. This process may slow down to allow for pauses at which a thesaurus or some other monolingual English dictionary may be used. If the precise words are successfully found, the text remains to be reconsidered only at the stage of editing. If not, this is a stage of search which may be terminated and renewed to be continued until the right exact words in English as the target language are found.

The stage of constant comparison of the words and collocations chosen for expression with conventional collocations in English as the target language is also as conscious. It is also integrated into the process of search of a general precision in expression.. This is the stage or an aspect of mental analysis when the mind works like a thesaurus. All known words and collocations which include the words in point are mentally skimmed through. Conventional collocations are uppermost in one’s mind in such cases. If a conventional collocation happens to approximate or to cover wholly the concept in point, the mental quest is resolved with satisfaction. This would be as happy a case as the one in which “a steep path” was chosen in the translation of the Third Ode by Horace or “intellectual content” in the translation of the text on the Lithuanian dramatist, both of which have been analysed above. In cases when they are distanced in meaning, conventional collocations help check the acceptability of new collocations by the degree of clarity of the words and by the concepts behind the words.

An intuitive test of the acceptability of collocations and statements in English may be integrated into the stage of comparison with conventional collocations in English or may be separated from it. But this test is rarely ever autonomous. It has to be part of some other engagement of the mind for the senses to function intuitively. The mind merely registers the intuitions which would be latent and ineffective if determination were to play a part in this process. Although the foreign speaker’s intuitions do not identify with the linguistic instinct of the native speaker, it is the same process physiologically. It also shows that what I have been considering in the whole and particularly at this point is the mind of a very advanced speaker of English as a foreign language: his verbal resources allow him to process words, collocations and sentences mentally, checking their acceptability with no books of reference from time to time.

It is the mind of so advanced a speaker of English as a foreign language that fully testifies to the influence of the referential use of English. All what has been said about the analytical functioning of the mind seeking equivalent expression in English as the target language develops under the influence of the analytic clarity of the referential use of English. The mind has only to be sufficiently exposed to it. It also has to accumulate a great amount of the verbal matter to be able to process verbal units independently. This is another way of saying that the person has to have committed to memory numberless verbal units and even texts in English. This need not have to be determined cramming. Memory, when it is sufficiently extensive, works of its own, without man’s conscious efforts or determination, and texts accumulate in the mind of their own.

With the mental processes in the mind as described, one can hardly overestimate the influence of the best referential use of English. Its influence on the alert and gifted mind is great and effective. It is also radically different from the influence of the language polluted with emotive uses, which was distrusted by Ogden and Richards in their day (Ogden, Richards, 1923, 149-151, 250). Such influence of the best referential use of English as has been described above does give enjoyment not only in the art of conversation but in other uses of English.

It cannot be denied that the mind fully charged with English could have achieved its capacity without the polishing and accomplishing influence of English imaginative literature. This is a special topic, however, to be discussed further on (see Chapter Five, below). One other point holds attention concluding this discussion of the influence of the referential use of English on the mind. It is customary to assume that the learning of a foreign language changes a person and his outlook (cf.: Whorf, 1976; Bylund et al, 2011). Bearing in mind what has been said about the influence of the referential use of English and the person’s proficiency in English as a foreign language, this assumption has to be confirmed. At least English as a foreign language in its referential use trains a person intellectually and makes his mind analytical and clear. The mind becomes cleansed not only of “the customary stones and scorpions” (Ogden, Richards, 1923/1960, 250) but also of preconceptions which generate in smaller and less open societies and languages, especially in synthetic languages. But it takes a very advanced learner of English as a foreign language to have experienced so polishing an influence of the referential use of English.

The experience as described derives basically from the written referential use of English. The sharpness of the mind develops under the influence of the law of analytic clarity which is primary in the referential use of English. One trains one’s mind in reading the best texts in the referential use of English and writing himself. When in his essay Of Studies Francis Bacon said that “writing (maketh) an exact man”, he must have meant the influence of the referential use of English. Writing does make an exact man with a sharp mind if he trains himself on the best referential use of English.

Recent history offers different yet related impressions about English and the minds, clear and confused. Different peoples had had different concepts of their countries under the enforced rule through the cold war years. Some small East European nations whose vision spanned a narrower range considered their suffering the greatest. They, naturally, expected sympathy from the Western nations when the Iron curtain dropped. But they happened to realise something else. One of the first things they learnt about English speaking people was that the English are very rational and matter-of-fact. Naturally again, such characters were not profuse with sympathy, or so it seemed to the East Europeans. It seems to me I can bet that it was the English language in its referential use and the minds of its speakers that produced the impression. When a British or an American speaks, clarity shines through all preconceptions and their English “cuts through muddy thought like a knife through butter”, to quote Alistair Cooke. It is no wonder that an East European buried in the synthetic structures of his own language, which had been encumbered with ideological superlatives and empty generalities, happened to be startled when he came to be awakened to the stark precision and analytic clarity of English. Furthermore, he came to consider its speakers as rational, unemotional and unsympathetic, which, to an extent, they are.

English speakers, too, observed something else about East Europeans and paid back in their own coin. A sentimental nation was shown in a photo and the East Europeans were called very emotional, in the press. Whatever understanding was achieved in such an exchange of plain words rather than pleasantries, the observations were indicative of an important linguistic testimony. The East Europeans are definitely in an inferior position mainly because they cannot realise the advance of a modern analytical language. Generations of native speakers contributed to the analytic clarity of English making it a law, and the mind of English speakers is shaped by their own language. Furthermore, East Europeans fail to appreciate the reason of English speakers and the clarity of their language. It is only a foreign speaker of English who had experienced the influence of the analytic semantics of English on his own mind that can appreciate and praise such an influence. Such a foreign speaker of English tends to observe the principle of relativity in Benjamin Lee Whorf’s terms in the attitude of English speaking people when it is encountered by East Europeans. It is not only a different picture of the universe (cf.: Whorf, 1976, 214) that is evoked to the English speakers and to the East Europeans, it is primarily the difference between the minds and attitudes of the two groups of speakers, whose minds are shaped by their different languages.

The power of reason and the clarity of thought of the English make them lively in speech, communicative, but not emotionally involved and often noncommittal. They are keen observers and energetic talkers, they expose clear judgement in any circumstances. This makes them superior and always correct in the referential use of English. East Europeans are quite different, self-centred by necessity and emotional. This is so because the verbal expression of East Europeans tends to be obscure: their synthetic language keeps their mind entangled. Moreover, their language is old, and there is a difference between their usage and that of advanced European languages. It is only natural, then, that such speakers of a synthetic language primarily identify with their own confused self and their own emotions. It is their linguistic habits that make the background of their thinking obscure. It is their language, affected through the cold war years, that does not activate reason and makes them self-centred individuals. There can be no better testimony of linguistic relativity between Indo-European languages than this difference of analytic clarity and synthetic obscurity of the two languages and the respectively shaped minds.

In their own respective conditions, the different languages can be equally effective means of communication. It is in cross-cultural communication that the effect of the differently advanced languages on the minds of the speakers becomes evident. However painful the observation may be, the analytic clarity of English and the respectively shaped minds of its speakers merit appraisal. Such minds are capable of impersonal reasoning, while the analytic clarity of the semantics of their language and that of their thinking become one. Analytic semantics of a language is so powerful that it can influence even the minds otherwise structured. The analytic clarity of the referential use of English can exercise this influence in its own right because it is the uppermost condition in use. One can therefore speak of the excellence of the English language because, at least in its referential use, this language provides conditions for the assessment of truth merely by verbal means. The referential use of language is a major use of English perhaps not so much for social reasons as for its value in the discipline of and influence on reasoning. As has been mentioned, analytic clarity of English is so powerful that it affects the mind of advanced foreign speakers making it disciplined in any language and very sensitive to the slightest flaws of the speakers thinking less clearly and to their own expression.