Semantics of nominal compounds in lithuanian ant latvian

Semantics of compounds hasn’t been in focus of linguistic research so far, so it is important to expand the field of studies on semantics of compounds. This research seeks to distinguish differences and similarities between the Lithuanian and the Latvian languages based on the semantics of Lithuanian and Latvian nominal compounds. The main aim of this BA thesis is to study the semantics of nominal compounds in Lithuanian and Latvian, to be more precise, to examine the underlying relations between the components of compounds and to compare the compounds with their equivalents in translation. The method applied to carry out this research was synchronic word-formation analysis; the material for this research – 144 Lithuanian and 449 Latvian nominal compounds and their equivalents in translation – was gathered from two Lithuanian and two Latvian novels: Kenotafas and Rūkas virš slėnių by Romualdas Granauskas and Uguns nemodina by Inga Abele and Jaunavas mācība by Nora Ikstena, and their translations to the Latvian and the Lithuanian languages. In the first part of the research the compounds went through several stages of classification: firstly, they were classified based on their morphological structure, than they were classified according to four syntactic-semantic types, and the final stage of classification was based on pure semantic relations between the head component and the modifier. The second part of the research was aimed at the comparison of the compounds and their translation equivalents. The research shows that in both languages the relations between compound components are overall similar, but the major differences underlie in the tendencies of translation. This paper might be useful for anyone whose subjects of interest are comparative linguistics, semantics or word-formation