The project team – Lithuanian particles and discourse structure

Assoc. prof. Erika Jasionytė-Mikučionienė (Principal investigator)

Vilnius University, Faculty of Philology
Institute of Applied Linguistics
Department of Lithuanian Language
Universiteto str. 5, LT-01513 Vilnius
(+370 5) 2687 212
Email: erika.jasionyte@flf.vu.lt

Erika’s research interests include the category of modality, the processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization in Present-day Lithuanian and old Lithuanian writings. In 2014 she defended her PhD thesis “Grammaticalization in Lithuanian: the rise of modal meanings” at Vilnius University. Receiving a grant from the Education Exchange Fund of Lithuania, in 2010 (April – July) she was on a research stay in the University of Copenhagen (supervisor – Dr. Kasper Boye). In the the academic year of 2010-2011 she was on an Erasmus study visit at the Center of Grammar and Typology of the University of Antwerp in Belgium (supervisor – Prof. Dr. Johan van der Auwera). She has taught the courses Syntax, Verb complementation to BA students at the Department of the Lithuanian Language.

Assoc. prof. Anna Ruskan

Vilnius University, Faculty of Philology
Institute of English, Romance and Classical Studies
Department of English Philology
Universiteto str. 5, LT-01513 Vilnius
(+370 5) 2687 228
Email: anna.ruskan@flf.vu.lt
Webpage

The focus of Anna’s research in the current project is on semantic, stuctural and functional features of discourse markers in journalistic discourse and in spoken Lithuanian.

Anna’s research interests include evidentiality, epistemic modality, stance, corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics and media discourse. In 2013 she defended her PhD thesis The Expression and Contents of Non-Morphological Evidentiality in Lithuanian: The Case of Neuter Adjectives and Adverbs at Vilnius University. In 2012 – 2013 she was on a research stay in Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Institute of Linguistics, Department of Baltic Languages), and in 2014 – 2015 she was on a study visit as a postdoc researcher at the University of Vienna (Department of English and American Studies). Anna is a member of such international associations as SLE, ESSE and IPrA. She has designed Media discourse selective course for BA students of English Philology at Vilnius University.

Assoc. prof. Audronė Šolienė

Audronė Šolienė has been working as a lecturer at the Department of English Philology of the Faculty of Philology in Vilnius University since 2006. She also worked as a lecturer at the Department of English Philology of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Vilnius Pedagogical University in 2002-2006. She has lectured on a variety of subjects including Academic Reading, Language Awareness, English Grammar, Corpus Linguistics, Semantics, Phrase Structure Grammar, and Contrastive Analysis. The scholar is also in charge of the students’ professional research-related internship in the field of corpus linguistics. Her primary research interests lie in the fields of contrastive linguistics, corpus linguistics, epistemic modality, evidentiality, stance and subjectivity, discourse markers as well as translation.

The scholar participated in a number of sabbatical study programmes: Erfurt University in Germany, Eger Eszterházy Károly Teachers’ Training College in Hungary and the University of Hull in the UK. In the academic year of 2008-2009 she was on an Erasmus study visit at the Centre of Grammar and Typology of the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

In 2013 she defended her PhD thesis titled “Realisations of Epistemic Modality in English and Lithuanian: Parameters of Equivalence”. During her PhD studies and the years after her defence, she participated in a number of international conferences in Lithuania and abroad and published a number of research articles dealing with epistemic-evidential expressions as well as discourse markers in a cross-linguistic perspective. The scholar was involved into the project titled “Realizations of modality and evidentiality in Lithuanian” (Ref. No. MIP-062/2014, funded by the Research Council of Lithuania). Currently, she is a member of the research team of the international project “Evidentiality: a discourse-pragmatic study of English and other European languages (EVIDISPRAG)” (Ref. No. FFI2015-65474-P, funded by MINECO (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness).

In the present project Audronė’s reseach focuses on the semantic, structural and functional features of discourse markers in different discourse types, namely in spoken Lithuanian and fiction. Also, she investigates the use of discourse markers in a cross-linguistic perspective.