Research concerning Authorship and the Inflection of Denominatives in the "Knyga Nobažnystės" based on a relational Database

he language of the 16th and 17th c. Lithuanian writings is one of the most important sources of the history of the Lithuanian language. The language of old writings can be analysed at various levels, e.g. phonetic, morphological, lexical, or syntactic. Most researchers focus their studies on the lexis of old writings. The dictionaries and the lexical registers of individual texts are being published, and a digitalized historical Lithuanian dictionary has become available online. Such books and dictionaries are very useful for morphological studies, however, due to the quite complex mechanism of material selection, these studies are still too time consuming. This study deals with the morphology of denominatives, i.e. features of the inflection of nouns and adjectives, in two parts of Kėdainiai publications (1653) commonly known as the Knyga nobažnystės (KN, ‘Book of Devotions’). The KN language is based on the western Aukštaitian Šiauliai dialect, which is considered to be the central written language variant of the 16th and 17th c. Studies on the denominative morphology of this language are still very fragmented. Most attention is paid to Daukša's texts; there are only a few studies of morphology in other publications of the same period. The research is based on modern information technologies: a digital copy of KN text and a relational model index as a tool for the language investigation was created; the data in the index was placed in interlinked data tables; further, the instrument for the grouping, sorting, and analysis of the language properties (especially morphology) was developed and applied, the old writings' morphology database was realized in DBMS MS Access; using this tool the earlier results of KN language studies were verified, the inflection of denominatives was investigated and described, the data of the KN morphology data base was clarified according to the results of the investigation