The article aims to show the applicability of two initial arguments by which the status of the NLP of Croatian is trying to be defined. These two arguments are: 1) NLP of Croatian must have a status of fundamental research in the field of humanities; 2) NLP of Croatian must have a status of strategic research of the Republic of Croatia.
More...The author analyzes the phonemic redistribution in English loan-words in Italian and concludes that it represents an innovation in the phonological system of the receiving language.
More...This paper discusses the situation of the Sami (Lapp) language of northern Scandinavia in the context of increasing language loss all over the world. Optimistic estimates suggest 30,000 speakers of Sami today, with a clear majority in Norway. After a long period of suppression from local and central authorities the Norwegian state now supports actively the use of Sami. It is pointed out that two areas or domains are especially vital for the continued use of the language: 1) traditional Sami activities such as reindeer breeding, hunting, fishing, and handicrafts; and 2) the families. Here the linguistic development of mixed families (Sami/non-Sami) seems to be of fundamental importance.
More...The intermediary language has an important role in the process of linguistic borrowing and has a multiple influence in the formation of loanwords in the receiving language. The influence of the intermediary language is present at all levels of linguistic adaptation and some phenomena of phonological, morphological and even lexical nature can be explained merely due to its existence. German is one of the languages which has had a major position in the Central European region and its influence on Croatian can be noticed both in direct and indirect contacts. This contribution discusses the role of German as an intermediary language in the adaptation of English loans in Croatian.
More...Autor se teksta bavi pitanjem prilagodbe francuskih kratica u hrvatskome. Autor kratice dijeli u dvije skupine. Prvu čine kratice koje se izgovaraju odvojeno, odnosno one kod kojih svako slovo zadržava svoj abecedni izgovor (B. C. G.). Drugu skupinu čine kratice koje se izgovaraju povezano, odnosno one kod kojih slova gube svoj abecedni izgovor te, postajući fonemima, čine dio monema (FIFA). Kratice, imajući svojstva leksema te uklapajući se u jezični sustav, mogu poslužiti kao osnova za sufiksalnu derivaciju.
More...The paper aims at outlining the influence of the English element on contemporary Romanian, trying to point out some peculiarities of the borrowing process. From among the problems under analysis, we mention: the nature of the borrowing process and its evolution, the rate and dynamic character of the borrowing phenomena, integration of the English element in the Romanian lexis and the relationship with the international pool of Anglicisms, general peculiarities of the adaptation process and conclusions.
More...The author presents the formation of augmentatives and their meanings. He shows that they can be formed by means of 30 suffixes, but central are 6 of them: -ina, -čina, -etina, -urina, -jurina, -usina, and in a way also -čuga, which is of recent origin and is becoming productive these days. The author focuses upon semantic and stylistic aspects of augmentatives and shows that they usually express also obsolacy, mocking. On the other hand, the Croatian augmentatives can also be used to express coziness.
More...The main goals of this contribution are 1) to propose and to illustrate a new model of identifying inflection classes, which is based on inflectional productivity, 2) to show the importance of language contact studies for the identification of productivity, 3) to elaborate on the consequences for contrastive typology, 4) to define and contrast morphological richness of two closely cognate languages: Polish and Croatian.
More...The paper is concerned with the relationship between typology and contrastive linguistics. Some less obvious benefits that this close encounter may have for typology are demonstrated by taking a closer look at so-called raising constructions. The usefulness of contrastive methodology in the verification or falsification of putative language universals and parameter-setting is exemplified on an earlier typological attempt by Eckman (1977) to generalize raising facts by means of an implicational scale. It is argued that the scale is untenable the way it was originally formulated. It has also been shown that a corpus-based bidirectional approach may make the picture that typology presents less neat and orderly but more realistic. Some issues bound to be uncovered by a contrastive approach, such as the importance of finiteness-non-finitness cline and productivity of syntactic constructions, together with attendant morphological and semantic factors such as morphological coding system, word order, predicate-argument structure, etc., are claimed to be essential ingredients of an alternative way of looking at the cross-linguistic differences and similarities in raising potential.
More...On the sample of five Croatian subjects with normal speech and hearing status who produced five VCV utterances (apa, afa, ata, asa, a{a) the influence of the bite-block articulation on sound duration was assessed. The sound duration measurements of the acoustic signals showed that the bite-block vowels are significantly longer compared to natural articulation (the first, stressed vowel 14 ms longer, and the second, unstressed vowel 25 ms longer), but that the bite-block consonant did not change its duration significantly (the consonant was longer only for 3 ms). The results reveal the considerable stability of the articulation program and the effective compensatory movements of the articulatory system in consonant articulation but only its partial effectiveness in vowel articulation.
More...The present article represents the results of an empirical investigation of familiarity with traditional Croatian proverbs. The study is based on the assumption that neither linguistic nor psycholinguistic studies will arrive at representative results unless the very material basis, which serves for any subsequent study, is empirically provided. Therefore the focus of research is shifted from questions such as how particular supra-lexical items are linguistically constructed, or how they are mentally stored or processed, to the primary question of which items are available (i. e., generally known). All 15,027 proverbs from V. J. Skarpa's "Hrvatske narodne poslovice" (1909) were distributed among eleven native speakers from various Croatian regions. As a result, less than one percent of the presented material was familiar to all subjects, and more than 75% of the material was classified as "unknown" by more than half of the subjects. Therefore, it seems necessary to draw the conclusion that most of the material from Skarpa's collection must be regarded as obsolete from a contemporary perspective. The results of the present study clearly demonstrate the need for a corpus of contemporarily familiar Croatian proverbs.
More...This article starts with an explanation of the term pseudoanglicism, which is followed by an analysis of words found in two dictionaries of anglicisms in French and considered to be pseudo-anglicisms. The analysis is carried out within the framework of the theory of languages in contact by Rudolf Filipović.
More...The paper is a frequency survey of five colour terms (black, white, grey, green, blue) used in 55 novels by 10 foremost 19th-century British writers. Both basic colour terms and terms with motivators have been registered - the latter (123 in all) are classified according to their semantic fields and morphological-syntactical types. The number of occurrences of white is equal to the combined occurrences of black and grey; with blue 50 p.c. more motivators are used than with green. Usage differs considerably with the writers but no particular colour dominates the perception of any writer. The author does not see any conflict between the universalist theory of Berlin-Kay and the relativist theory of Sapir and Whorf.
More...The general thesaurus is a semantics–based onomasiological reference tool listing undefined sets of semantically related lexical items. Traditionally, it has been associated primarily with the provision of synonyms and the contrast between conceptual and alphabetical macrostructural arrangement.
More...This paper presents some theoretical aspects of semantic primitives through Wierzbicka's and Mel'čuk's work. The author discusses the existence of semantic primitives in the tradition of componential analysis, trying also to emphasize some problems and positive aspects concerning the model of semantic primitives.
More...The paper discusses the problem of numerous reconstructed Indo-European root-morphemes with the basic meaning "to flow", "to run". According to semantic analysis of root-morphemes of some important European river-names, Proto-Indo-Europeans used almost thirty verbs with very limited shifts in meaning for defining the flowing of the water. If that is so, it may imply that Proto-Indo-European had some linguistic features like none of the languages that later developed from it, or any other language.
More...Nakon što je više godina pokušavao »usavršiti« model Heinza Klossa (1978.) autor je 1985. god. počeo graditi vlastiti, relativistički model koji poštuje načela postmoderne logike i ima nekoliko nesvijesnih prethodnika. Njegova primjena u romanistici, konkretno u objašnjavanju nastanka i povijesti romanskih jezika (v. pogl. 2), otvorila je nove vidike ne samo u dijakronijskoj nego i u dinamičkoj sinkronijskoj perspektivi pa je stoga i doživjela dobar prijam u struci, osobito kod pripadnika »malih«, više-manje ugroženih jezika. Autor se nada da će i stručnjaci za ostale jezične obitelji moći s uspjehom primijeniti ovaj pristup i tako pridonijeti njegovoj ovjerenosti i daljem razvoju.
More...Kada se govori o ergativu, uobičajno je u jezikoslovlju govoriti o posebnome padežu u nekim fleksijskim jezicima (baskijskome, tibetskome, gruzijskome), koji bi bio različit od nominativa, a koji izražava agensa procesa, pa se onda govori i o ergativnim jezicima. Gledano tako ima li uopće smisla govoriti o ergativnosti u hrvatskome, kada u njemu poznajemo sve padeže, a ergativ nikada nije spominjan. Može li se pojam ergativnosti postaviti drukčije? Što je u stvari ergativnost i kako je možemo objasniti? Može li se hrvatski jezik povezati s pojmom ergativnosti? To su pitanja na koja ćemo pokušati dati odgovor u ovome članku.
More...English is not the official language of the United States of America, despite wide-spread belief to the contrary. The 56 signers of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 were all of British ancestry and for them, all native speakers of English, declaring English to be the country's national language would have seemed unnecessary. From a 1790 census of some 4 million inhabitants the country's population has soared to over 265 million in 1996, a number that includes millions of immigrants or descendants of immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. Immigration, legal and illegal, continues to bring to the USA large numbers of people whose native language is not English. The cost of providing remedial and other services for immigrants has evoked a rise in »nativism«, such that many of the country's 50 states have passed legislation mandating English as the official language and now legislation is before the U. S. Congress to declare English as the required language for all government transactions. The author supports such legislation in order to clarify ambiguous situations but he also supports bilingual education for a limited period so as to provide a transition for immigrant children from their native language to English.
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