
Noun phrase - introductory notes
Imenska skupina - uvodno
Keywords: noun phrase; syntax; construction;
This is an introduction to the special issue dedicated to the description of the noun phrase.
More...Keywords: noun phrase; syntax; construction;
This is an introduction to the special issue dedicated to the description of the noun phrase.
More...Keywords: determiner; modifier (attribute); nominal group; Systemic Functional Grammar;
In most of the existing grammars of the Croatian language words are directly analyzed into clauses (or sentences), and therefore the sentence is taken as the main syntactic unit. Consequently, these grammars, with rare exceptions (for example, Silić and Pranjković 2007; Belaj and Tanacković Faletar 2014), almost completely ignore the syntax of groups (phrases) and their parts, as well as the syntax of clauses and the syntax of discourse. Also, the lack of description based on a particular theoretical approach results in the mixing of grammatical levels and inconsistent terminology. Based on the study of various contemporary approaches to the interpretation of nominal groups, we support the view that the term ‘attribute’ has been inadequately used in more traditional approaches to Croatian grammar, and emphasize the need to distinguish modifiers from determiners. Furthermore, this paper tries to provide a simple model of description of nominal groups, with particular reference to the concept of determiner, within the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday 1985, 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004; Fawcett 2010) as an approach that sees language as a social category and analyzes its use in actual communication.
More...Keywords: syntactic structure of noun phrases; Croatian noun phrase; nominal left periphery; split DP Analysis; (in)definiteness and specificity;
This paper investigates the syntactic structure of nominal expressions in Croatian and proposes their analysis in terms of a split DP. Within the split DP-approach, the nominal left periphery contains functional projections DefP, FocP, TopP and DP. I will show that these functional categories host different lexical items (e.g. determiners, demonstratives, possessives, etc.) that contribute to the (in)definiteness and specificity of the Croatian noun phrase. A reanalysis of the nominal left periphery in terms of a split DP allows for the explanation of DP-internal word order variations, along with some other syntactic phenomena.
More...Keywords: nominal phrase; determiners; gender feature; topic-focus; individualisation;
Determiners enclose information on the relation a noun in a structure has to its value in the discourse. In languages with overt determiners, the definite article rarely refers back to an individual introduced in the previous sentence, rather the article emphasises the topichood of the topic; by contrast, in languages with no overt article, determiners are employed to refer back to the anaphora in the preceding sentence. The asymmetry of these two systems requires spelling out of the process by which an individual is detected for coindexation in the latter language type. Here, in order to point to the variability in processes of expressing and establishing individual’s features, we determine the features contributing to individualization in higher projections of nominal domain with a nominal, and a clausal, nucleus. Demonstrating that the relation between the nominal domain and the discourse is achieved through agreement in Person feature in subject-predicate dependency, and furthermore, that Person feature is predicted to assist at insuring coindexation across discourse, we present a process in which features ensures the values, and structural relations determine the moment at which they surface.
More...Keywords: definiteness; gender; Modern Bulgarian; hypocoristic names; pragmatic choice; grammar rules; Balkan linguistic features;
The paper considers the anomalous use of definiteness and gender in Bulgarian noun phrases containing hypocoristic names, nicknames or sometimes even legal personal names. Proper names of people, being semantically definite, usually do not take the definite article in Bulgarian. But in the cases considered it is just the opposite – in informal conversation, in fiction or in ironic statements the use of a definite article is either obligatory or facultative depending on the formal and semantic features of the names. The factors to trigger the anomalous use described may be the female sex of the designee, the less typical ending of the noun, its being grammatically neuter or its inclusion in an attributive phrase. Thus the female legal personal names (e.g. Marija, Elena) may take a definite article on some special occasions (Marijata, Elenata) but male legal personal names (e.g. Boris) cannot. Male legal or hypocoristic names ending in -o (Stojko, Borko<Boris) never take the definite article, male names ending in -e may or may not take the definite article (Bore/Boreto<Boris) but female names ending in -e always take the definite article in colloquial Bulgarian (Marčeto<Marija, Lenčeto<Elena). What is more, their attributes are in the neuter and not in the feminine (hubavoto Lenče<hubavata Elena). Male hypocoristic names ending in -a, even those derived from family names, always take the definite article (Penata<Penev, Vucata<Vucov) but their attributes are in the masculine. Corresponding forms without an article (Bore, Marče, Lenče, Pena, Vuca) are used as vocatives or sometimes as predicatives. The phenomenon is stylistically marked which means that the choice of such noun phrases is pragmatic, but the rules which determine the use of definiteness and gender in them are grammatical. These are particular rules which operate in a minority of situations and contradict the general rules operating in the majority of contexts. Some of them are rigid but others are optional and introduce additional nuances into the statement. The phenomenon can be interpreted as a Balkan linguistic feature partially mani-fested in Bulgarian. Its occurrence in folklore texts might qualify it as rela-tively old.
More...Keywords: quantification; noun phrases; grammatical quantification; quantificators; quantifiers; numerical and non-numerical quantification;
The paper deals with the ways in which quantification is expressed in noun phrases in the standard Croatian language. Among other things, we focus on the grammatical and semantic types of quantifiers and on the distinctions between quantifiers, quantificators and particularisers. In relation to this, we propose a possible typology of quantifiers and quantificators. The remainder of the paper focuses on numerical (e.g. te dvije zanimljive knjige, pet pari cipela) and non-numerical quantification (e.g. puno problema, mnogi turisti, neki događaji), on unit-based (e.g. jedini stvarni problem, dobar osjećaj) and non-unit-based quantification (e.g. novi problemi, naši mladenci, deset dana, žuto lišće), on affirmative (e.g. sve njezine knjige, sve tri njezine knjige) and negative general quantification (e.g. nijedna njezina knjiga, nijedna od triju njezinih knjiga), on conjunctive quantification (e.g. Ana i njezina kolegica došle su prerano, Posjetili smo Sofiju, Plovdiv i Istanbul), on quantification in noun phrases containing collective (e.g. svježe cvijeće, cijela obitelj) and mass nouns (e.g. tanjur graha, dvije vreće brašna) and on different types of pluralisation.
More...Keywords: numeral phrases; counted word; cardinal number 1000; noun 1000; adjective 1000; adverb 1000; determinator;
There are many ways to express a cardinal number 1000 in Croatian. Along with a lexical diversity (tisuća, hiljada, som, jezero, miljar, tavžan i sl.) there exists a morphosyntactic one described in this article. The corpus based on the examples picked from Google Search reveals the cardinal number 1000 as a noun, an adjective or an adverb. The noun 1000 can be accompanied either by a counted word in the genitive plural or in the case required. As can be expected, a counted word agrees with the adjectival number 1000. With the adverb 1000 a counted word is usually in the genitive plural. The other possibilities are the case required and the unexpected case.The determinators of the adverbial 1000 appear in different forms: 1) a congruent feminine accusative singular; 2) a petrified neuter accusative singular; 3) the genitive plural and 4) a syntactic case required. The examples from the oldest Croatian texts written in Church Slavonic show the same tendencies in forming the numeral phrases.
More...Keywords: non-numerically quantified noun phrases; government; agreement; Croatian Church Slavonic;
Non-numerically quantified noun phrases with a governing quantifier are those in which adverbial or substantival quantifiers govern the complement in genitive case, e.g. in Croatian Church Slavonic:(1) vele blaga much treasure-GEN.SGʽa lot of treasureʼ (2) čest' ribi pečeni piece-NOM.SG fish-GEN.SG broiled-GEN.SGʽa piece of broiled fishʼThe paper examines and describes basic semantic and syntactic characteristics of this kind of quantified noun phrases (QNPs) with regard to QNP's components and their number, word order, genitive of quantity, QNP – predicate agreement, QNP – next predicate agreement, QNP – anaphoric words agreement. The agreement analysis shows that both components of a QNP, quantifier as well as its compliment, can act as an agreement controller. The study is based on the corpus of the Croatian Glagolitic texts of the Church Slavonic period, i.e. on the referential and representative corpus of the Dictionary of the Croatian Redaction of Church Slavonic. Therefore, some noticeable diachronic features in compari-son with modern Croatian have been mentioned as well.
More...Keywords: Croatian; adjective; noun; relationship; expression of properties;
Starting from an adjusted version of the generative transformational grammar, the paper analyses the relationship of the adjective inserted as an attribute to the noun, both at the syntactic and the semantic level. The attribute is thus observed as a modified predicate. The difference of the relationship between the noun and the attribute is shown in any of thesyntactic functions, depending on the type of the nouns and the reasons for inserting the adjective as their attributes and the formation of nominal groups.The role of the attribute boils down to revealing which of the invariant or variant features of the noun is used, whether it being the quality or the quantity of the content expressed by it. With the nouns with the large scope of meaning the role of the attribute is restrictive: by narrowing their scope their meaning is expanded. There is a significant determinative role of the attribute, especially in the case of the one expressed by an appropriate adjective and the adjectival aspect, when it shows the definiteness of the noun marking definiteness.By selecting appropriate means it can be shown whether the noun is used in its primary sense or in some of its secondary senses, which can be useful not only in the use of nouns but in their lexicographic processing as well.
More...Keywords: possessive genitive; possessive adjective; scientific terminology;
The paper focuses on the analysis of Croatian word combinations consisting of head noun + genitive noun or adjective + noun. The analysis has been carried out on examples of scientific terms used in different fields (mechanical engineering, communicology, etc.) primarily with respect to the norm which prescribes that in standard Croatian (including Croatian scientific terminologies) the word combination consisting of adjective + noun is given preference if such a combination has the same meaning as a combination consisting of head noun + genitive noun. In view of the fact that the scientific terminology contains many word combinations which seem not to observe this rule of the Croatian norm, sources and implications of the rule are considered and the cases in which combinations head noun + genitive noun are not replaced by combinations adjective + noun are formalized. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between the two ways of modifying the head noun (with an adjective or a genitive noun), to identify what factors influence the possibility/impossibility to transform one combination into another and to determine the scope of the mentioned rule. By studying synonymous terms of these two combination types used in practice (e.g. osovina kočnice and kočnička osovina, lanac dizalice and dizalični lanac, ležajna nestabilnost and nestabilnost ležaja, vratilo pogona and pogonsko vratilo, medijska odgovornost and odgovornost medija, medijski pravobranitelj and pravobranitelj medija, programski monitoring and monitoring programa), the existence of which also suggests that users are not comfortable with following this rule, the terms which occur in only one of the two combination types (os ležaja, dijelovi ležaja, ploča remena, glava cilindra, ventil motora, glava pile, brzina rezanja, prototip motora, smjer vlakana, bolest bubrega, upala jetre; pogonski kotač, usisni ventil, bubrežni kamenac, jetrene probe) and the terms that occur in both combinations but have different meanings (metalno prevlačenje and prevlačenje metala, medijska pismenost and pismenost medija) conclusions are reached based on which the rule should be amended and modified.
More...Keywords: nominalization; external argument; Slovenian;
This paper presents an analysis of Slovenian deverbal external argument nominalizations in a syntactic approach, where the focus is on Slovenian agentive and instrumental deverbal nominalizations in -(V)lec, the most nu-merous and productive class in the language according to Stramljič Breznik (1999). It is proposed that these nominals fall in three distinct classes according to the type of the Aspect head found in the nominalization: i) episodic eventive nominals, ii) dispositional eventive nominals (both denoting animate agents) and iii) functional nominals (denoting instruments and humans in professional or temporary functions). The last type is newly introduced, as English and French-based approaches such as Alexiadou and Schäfer (2010) and Roy and Soare (2014) cannot accommodate Slovenian data relating to the presence and properties of the genitive objects found in Slovenian functional nominals.
More...Keywords: word formation; semantics; nominals with -ač; event-related adjectival tests;
The paper applies the event-related adjectival tests, formed by Roy and Soare (2014), to the Croatian deverbal agentive nouns with the suffix -ač. Instrument, dispositional and episodic nominals were tested. Although instrument nominals are special in a way, some language evidence suggests that splitting agentive nouns in only two classes (episodic and dispositional), proposed by Alexiadou and Schäfer (2010), also makes sense.
More...Keywords: corpus; Croatian; collocation; free combination;
Noun phrases in Croatian can differ in the degree of correlation between its constituents. Some constituents form a descriptive free word combinations (velik stol ʽlarge table’, sunčan dan ʽsunny day’, slatka kava ʽsweet coffee’, hladne ruke ʽcold hands’), while others form multiword units which concretize extra-linguistic content that can not be ex-pressed in one word (crna kava ʽblack coffee’, krevet na kat ‘bunk bed’, kreditna kartica ‘credit card’, radno mjesto ‘workplace’). Dependent constituents can be adjectives, which are congruent with a noun (velika soba ‘big room’, radno mjesto ‘working place’), or they can be adverb phrase or prepositional phrase (korak naprijed ‘step ahead’, mnogo ljudi ‘many people’, malo prijatelja ‘a few friends’, četkica za zube ‘toothbrush’, roba s greškom ‘faulty good’). This paper will analyze noun mreža (with reach syntagmatic and semantic potential) and its co-occurrences – they can either form a collocation or a free combination of words. The lexicographic description will be compared with the corpus-data. The analyses will take into consideration a list of computationally obtained collocates (collocation candidates) of a node noun. The frequency and the strength between the words occurring within a particular span can differ. The list of collocates obtained from the corpus will be taken into account and we will examine how it coincides with the existing lexicographic description and with theoretical principles of word combination interpretations in Croatian. The aim of the study is to determine how the corpus analysis can improve the treatment of word-combination entries in lexicographic work.
More...Keywords: Accounting Act; financial statement; non-financial undertakings
The aim of this article is to demonstrate the complexity of annual reporting which is obligatory for non-financial undertakings in Poland. The Author takes into account the provisions of the Accounting Act to provide a detailed analysis, demonstrating that the amendments made to the Act in 2014 and 2015, aiming to minimise the bureaucratic burden placed on smaller economic operators, substantially change the structure of a financial statement. This implies that beginning in 2016 many different financial reporting standards will appear in the economic operation of non-financial enterprises. The content of a given statement will depend on the character and size of an entity as well as the accounting principles it employs. Financial statements submitted by micro- and small enterprises are less complex. An evolution of the structure and content of financial statements has a significant impact on the communication between economic undertakings and their environment.
More...Keywords: USSR; Soviet government; National Economic Policy; planned economy; credit and economic relations; industrialisation; 5-year plan; foreign trade monopoly; trading balance; commercial agreements
In 1923 the Soviet Union began to receive credits from foreign firms for periods of 3 to 6 months. Despite an official credit blockade private entrepreneurs were interested in expanding their businesses into the yet unexplored Soviet market. This expansion had to rely on lending activity. However, the blockade made foreign bank and company loans expensive in the first period of reconstruction. Initially, these were short-term commercial credits, mostly intended to finance the Soviet imports of finished products since the circulation of goods was mostly regulated by the State interventionist policy at that time. In the years 1921–1925, the major types of foreign credits associated with Soviet imports were: a) trade credits secured with bills of exchange, b) acceptance-reimbursement credits of foreign banks. Starting in 1926 the governments of capitalist countries began to support industrial companies exporting goods to the USSR on credits secured with bills of exchange. Exporters had to pay a commission to certain institutions for guarantees they were given by the State. The commission along with interest on the credits was reimbursable by the Soviet import organisations.The basic rule of the trading policy in the Soviet Union of 1918–1940 was to adjust imports to a particular demand specified in the plan. The general State trading plan established assumed volumes of export and relevant imports. In this way, a positive trade balance was attempted. Using the endorsed plan as the starting point and the resources coming from exports, the Commissariat of Foreign Trade executed the plan of imports buying goods abroad on convenient terms. During the fiscal year, exports were monitored and based on its volume permissions (licences) were issued to bring goods into USSR stating the country of origin, kind of goods and the price for which they were to be bought
More...Keywords: foreign debt; credit; payment problems; bankruptcy
This article aims to bring issues concerning creation in the decade of the seventies of the twentieth century, the problem of excessive debt then your Polish. This was the result pursued by exercising the power team of Edward Gierek's so-called policy of openness to economic cooperation with Western countries. The approach of established financial and diplomatic cooperation with capitalist states meant the animators had to lead at the same time to catch up on the state of civilizational backwardness and to pacify the negative public sentiment. At the same time it meant allowing large-scale use of the increase in foreign debt Polish People's Republic as the basis for a more dynamic pace of economic development. Borrowings helped the communist authorities, above all, maintain inefficient economic system, providing him with funds to create temporary, illusory prosperity. As a result, instead of reducing the differences of civilization since the seventies Polish increased dependence on external centers. In addition, the creation of the problem of over-indebtedness and the impossibility of its use for many years paralyzed the possibilities of development of The Polish economy and contributed to the eventual collapse of the socialist system.
More...Keywords: statistical analysis; demography of Poland
In article statistical analysis was showed relating structure of demography of Poland in the period of 1989-2013. Date from GUS statistical analysis was subjected additionally. Appropriate conclusions finish work.
More...Keywords: interim management; flexible employment forms; enterprise management
The concept of interim management (IM) is still relatively little known in Poland. However, it can become widespread and highly regarded solution in the Polish enterprises as a result of striving to increase labour mobility and flexibility of employment forms in the European Union.The aim of the paper is the analysis of the possibilities of implementing the concept of interim management as a flexible form of employment in the modern enterprise. At the outset, the essence and genesis of the concept of interim management has been presented. In the following part, the labour market for interim managers in Europe and Poland has been characterized. The comparison of this form of flexible employment and other forms used in Polish companies has been conducted. In the final part of the article, the key benefits and risks of implementation the concept of IM for the company as well as for interim managers have been identified.
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