Spanish to Lithuanian: identify who feels a state before copying pronouns
An experiencer is a meaning, not one fixed sentence position
The academy defines an experiencer as the human or animate participant undergoing the feeling or process described. In Spanish, that participant can appear as an indirect object, a direct object, or the grammatical subject, depending on the predicate. Its contrast between Pedro being frightened and a noise frightening Pedro shows why translating a statement of sensation requires more than identifying the first person mentioned.
For Lithuanian output, keep the person experiencing the state separate from its cause and from an affected body part. Spanish me or le in such a sentence does not necessarily identify a recipient of something being handed over. Nor does a Spanish subject automatically have the semantic role of an intentional actor. The same person can be affected in two differently organized descriptions. Before selecting Lithuanian case forms, establish who feels what and whether the source explicitly identifies a cause. Those roles should remain stable even when the target changes the sentence’s visible grammatical arrangement.
Lithuanian pain expressions do not all use the same case pattern
Piccini’s primary presentation gives Ar tau žandą labai maudžia?, asking whether the listener’s jaw hurts a lot. Its analysis assigns dative case to the experiencer and accusative case to the body-part theme. This is a concrete warning against choosing a nominative target pronoun merely because a Spanish paraphrase begins with the person affected. The body part and the person have separate grammatical roles in the attested construction.
The presentation also documents different experiential patterns, including an accusative experiencer with certain predicates and nominative body-part alternatives elsewhere. These examples come from identified textual, corpus, and regional sources; they are not a rule that any case can replace any other after any pain verb. For Spanish-to-Lithuanian wording, check the construction belonging to the selected predicate. The study’s historical alignment proposal is distinct from that practical descriptive fact. A source statement of physical discomfort should not acquire a new voluntary agent simply because the target verb has morphology associated with other constructions in the language.
Case and agreement need checking at different levels
The original Lithuanian treebank documentation recognizes nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental case. It also notes that object constructions are not restricted to accusative phrases: dative, genitive, and instrumental phrases can have object roles in its annotation. For a Spanish source, the presence or absence of a preposition cannot therefore be used as a complete diagnostic of the target noun’s relationship to its predicate.
The documentation separately records gender and number on nominal words and agreement on adjectives and other forms. These grammatical properties answer different questions from the case that links a participant to an experiential predicate. Spanish wording may identify a woman, several people, or one affected part without implying that each target word will display matching endings. Preserve those identities and quantities, then assess case and agreement within the actual Lithuanian construction. A target ending that looks unlike the dictionary form may be necessary; an ending chosen only to resemble another nearby noun can change which entity the sentence describes as affected.
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