We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
This article offers a look into the controversial issue of semantics and usage of passive structures by examining evidence from Bulgarian, Russian, and English. Efforts are made to clarify the semantic differences between active and passive structures, especially with respect to the notions of “passive meaning” and “centrifugal/centripetal direction of verbal action”. Special attention is also paid to the identification of semantic and syntactic reasons for a wider use of passives in analytical languages compared to synthetic languages.
More...
The article deals with the controversial issue of relations between voice and transitivity. It is claimed that the traditional approach which maintains the existence of direct and obligatory connection between transitivity and passivizability contradicts the language reality. Proposition is made to replace the traditional binary opposition of transitive/intransitive verbs with a scale of transitivity.
More...
The paper treats the regularities in the distribution of the verbs ima and sam in Bulgarian existential sentences from the standpoint of logical syntax. Sentences containing ima conform with typical communicative referential characteristics of existential sentences, while sentences containing sam realize peripheral models in the domain of existence. Semantic and pragmatic properties of sam-sentences are described in the comparison to similar structures with ima. Contrasts with Russian verbal and nonverbal existential sentences reveal the lack of exact parallelism between Bulgarian and Russian in the domain of existence.
More...
Review of: В. Попова. Психолингвистика на развитието. Когнитивни аспекти на синтактичната компетенция. Шумен, Университетско издателство „Епископ Константин Преславски“, 2000, 129 стр.
More...
Review of: Iv. Popоva-Vеleva. La syntaxe française: Notions de base & Exercices / Ив. Поповa-Bелевa. Френски синтаксис: Основни понятия & Упражнения. “Gaberoff”. Велико Търново, 1999-2000. 196 стр.
More...
The imperfect (tense form) of (aspectually) perfective verbs was historically a relatively rare but nevertheless common Slavic phenomenon which finally developed further and was preserved only in Modern Bulgarian (including its spoken and/or written variants in the Republic of Macedonia, Eastern Serbia etc.) and partially in Literary Serbian. When its meaning is not iterative it is always modal (expressing imaginary, desirable, expected, plausible actions or states) which is in compliance with the Balkan linguistic context. Its Greek counterpart is the modal imperfect participating in the so called Modern Greek syntactic moods and able (despite of the continuous or iterative invariant meaning of the Greek imperfect) to express momentary or resultative (and not iterative!) actions or states. In Polish, as a representative of Northern Slavic, in such cases the conditional form of a perfective verb is used. So a correspondence can be observed which is a part of the general tendency that in the simple past tenses (where Bulgarian, unlike Modern Greek or Modern Northern Slavic, can combine aorist and perfect tense endings with both perfective or imperfective verbal stems) the Bulgarian verbs should coincide in aspect with the Northern Slavic ones but in tense with the Greek ones. If so it becomes obvious that in the past tenses the meaning of the Modern Greek verbal stem is more temporal and modal and less aspectual while in the future tense, in the imperative and in the Modern Greek constructions with na (corresponding to the Modern Bulgarian constructions with da or to the infinitive and subjunctive forms in other languages) the meaning of the Modern Greek verbal stem is predominantly aspectual and it is in this case that Modern Bulgarian, Modern Greek and Modern Northern Slavic perform a considerable aspectual symmetry.
More...
The article throws light upon the theoretical understanding of the role and place of abbreviations, as well as the description of the structural and semantic features of the abbreviation vocabulary. It aims at developing a systematic approach to the study of this phenomenon on the material of an English literary text by defining the types of acronyms in English on the basis of conventional, common usage, analysis of the systemic, structural, semantic characteristics of the abbreviated vocabulary of English and by trying establish the basic structural-semantic characteristics of such vocabulary.
More...
The article deals with a morphosyntactic innovation in Komi, namely adjectives formed from adverbial participles (converbs). Such lexical units have not been previously studied, and the identification of their part-of-speech status may be challenging, as, for example, in the Komi electronic corpus (http://komicorpora.ru/), from where the material was partially extracted. In the present study, these lexemes are defined as author’s neologisms. The study clarifies the part-of-speech status of these units and determines the processes of word formation. The research material has been extracted from original and translated literary works of the 20th—21st centuries. It is revealed that adjectives are derived from the adverbial participles (or converbs) in -иг, -игöн, and -тöдз in two ways: complex-suffixal and suffixal, with the help of the productive adjective derivation suffixes -са, -ся, and the bases кад, водз, дыр, чöж depending on semantics. They usually occur as attributes, but attested is also one instance of predicative function.
More...
The paper presents an analysis of two types of syntactic constructions: constructions with a quantized verb like zaklepat 'knock' and a quantifier like dvakrát 'twice' on the one hand and constructions with reciprocals like navštívit se (vzájemně) 'visit each other' and a quantifier like dvakrát 'twice.' Both of these syntactic construction types display a similar ambiguity: for instance, dvakrát zaklepat 'to knock twice' means either 'to make two knocks' or 'to make two series of knocks' while dvakrát se vzájemně navštívit means either 'to make two visits' or 'to make four visits (two and two),' with the former senses being instances of "internal" quantification (what is quantified is part of the meaning of the quantized verb and the reciprocal, but it cannot be directly expressed with it). Through this analysis a group of conditions has been identified which arguably have to be met so that the ambiguity could arise: 1. The denotation of the predicate can be divided into separate actions. If reciprocals like navštívit se (vzájemně) 'to visit (each other)' are considered autonomous verbs (i.e. not syntactic constructions), then it is the case that: 2. The separate actions can be expressed with a verb which is a base for the respective quantized verb or the reciprocal verb in a derivational sense; 3. The verb is syntactically intransitive. A general condition for the observed ambiguity is an interaction of two quantifiers. It can be assumed that when an "external" quantification is opted for, i.e., sets of events are counted, the quantification carried out by the quantized verb or by the reciprocal usually happens before the quantification related to a quantifier like dvakrát 'twice.'
More...
This article scrutinizes metadiscourse in English-medium academic prose by Russian writers from two different discourse communities focusing on the ways they interact with the reader and present themselves and their research results. It is assumed that the distribution of interactional metadiscourse elements varies across disciplines. The theoretical basis of the study is Hyland’s (2005) model of interactional metadiscourse which offers a pragmatically-grounded method of studying metadiscourse in academic texts. The study was carried out on a corpus of 156 abstracts derived from two Russian journals in the field of linguistics and computer engineering. The study confirmed Hyland’s findings about research article abstracts in the humanities and hard sciences, though it revealed some distinctive features of English-medium research article abstracts by Russian writers. The findings can enhance English L2 novice academic writers’ familiarity with the academic writing conventions in the discipline.
More...
The article deals with the comprehensive analysis of the formal-syntactic structure of simple sentences with verbal predicates of presence / absence which state or deny the fact of subject’s presence, existence and organize existential sentences. The analysis of sentences with verbal predicates of presence / absence shows that their semantic structure mainly consists of existential predicate and subject which are represented by the principal parts of the sentence – the grammatical predicate and subject at the formal-syntactic sentence level. The relations between the semantic and formal-syntactic structure of sentences with the predicates of presence / absence are represented by the correlative and non-correlative types of relations.
More...
Following the proposal in Seiler and Heine, possession is defined in terms of relationship between two entities, called possessor and possessed. Linguistic possession can be of different types: permanent, physical, inalienable, abstract, etc. In Italian and Croatian, possession is expressed by adjectives, pronouns, and prepositional phrases. In Croatian, it can be expressed also by morphological cases. In Italian, possession is rendered with possessive adjectives and pronouns (mia sorella) and the complement of possessive specification (la sorella di Mira). In Croatian, it is expressed equally (moja sestra); with the dative of the personal pronouns (sestra mi); with the possessive adjectives (posvojni pridjev; Mirina sestra); with the double genitive (sestra mojega oca); with the complement of possessive specification in the substandard varieties (sestra od Mire). The contribution investigates the ways to express possession in Molise Croatian, a štokavo-ikavo variety in use in the linguistic island of the Croatian minority in Italy, in Molise, from a contact-linguistics and contrastive perspective. As at all linguistic levels, when indicating ownership, Molise Croatian has conservative, Croatian, and innovative uses and forms, derived from contact with Italian and the Abruzzo-Molisan variety. In Molise Croatian, one can express ownership by using possessive pronouns (posvojne zamjenice/pridjevi; moja sestra); the dative of personal pronouns (sestra mi); the possessive adjective (posvojni pridjev; sestra Mirina); the complement of possessive specification (sestra do Mire); the double genitive (sestra mojoga oca). The main objective of this corpus-based research is to analyse and describe the influence of Italian and of the Abruzzo-Molisan variety on the morphosyntax and the distribution of possessives in Molise Croatian.
More...
In the current study, the author aims to continue the detailed analysis of the inherited Latin adjectives used adverbially in Romanian in order to highlight the lexical-semantic and functional features of the word adevăr ‘really’ in the ancient period, when it had different uses. The starting point for the analysis was some previous contributions, in whose pages aspects concerning adjectives with similar morphosyntactic behavior have been described, some of them, at that time, being presented sequentially, revealing the typological characteristics of the class and less the morphological or the phraseological (implicitly prepositional) variation of each lexical unit. The choice of this adverbial adjective as the main topic of the current analysis is also explained by the fact that, in ancient texts, its number of occurrences was relatively significant because it was often found in the structure of adverbial phraseological units. For a proper interpretation, the author uses a corpus of ancient language (SOR Corpus), which facilitates an objective analysis of language facts. It also refers to similar studies and dictionaries of Romance languages to show the similarities between them, more exactly similar uses, confirming the unity of the Neolatin idioms regarding the adverbials. In this paper, the author will prioritise several perspectives: the etymological, the Romance, the morphological, the structural and the syntactic. The main aim is to illustrate the dynamics of this adverb in the ancient language, which was, naturally, much more striking than nowadays. This analysis will undoubtedly make it possible to identify certain constants and relate them to other adverbial adjectives in order to confirm or refute some trends in the language or to seek the fixing of some structures or the generalization of some particular phraseological variants.
More...
The paper discusses a new way to measure syntactic complexity in foreign language acquisition. It is based on a recently proposed syntactic unit called linear dependency segment (LDS), the longest possible sequence of words belonging to the same clause where all linear neighbours are also syntactic neighbours. The dataset comprises 5,721 Czech texts from the CzeSL-SGT learner corpus covering five CEFR proficiency levels (A1–C1). The study covers two analyses. First, the development of the average clause length in terms of LDS and the average LDS length in the number of words across the latter language proficiency levels. Second, we consider the differences between Slavic and non-Slavic speakers. The results show an increasing tendency of the average clause length measured in LDS while the average clause length measured in words is decreasing. Results also show statistically significant differences between Slavic and non-Slavic speakers in most cases. Our results indicate that using LDS may be a useful unit of syntactic complexity measure in foreign language acquisition research.
More...
The article presents a synchronic, contrastive, generative X-bar model of Danish, Swedish, and Bulgarian causative and resultative structures of the object control and object predicative types in the context of language interference among Bulgarian students with L2s such as English, German and other widely-spoken European languages studied in Bulgarian high schools. Via a semantic role-based way to model corpus examples in parallel in the three languages, an argument is made that providing a parallel with Bulgarian would be a more effective way to teach the difference between these constructions.
More...
The paper examines the usage of the forms of past tense in the language of Stefan Mitrov Ljubiša. Based on the syntactic-semantic analysis of the examples excerpted from "The Stories Told by Vuk Dojčević", and having compared it with the situation in the contemporary literary language and the speech of the writer's homeland, the author concludes that, in terms of verb syntax, the language of the selected work is significantly different from the contemporary one, which is rather simplified, especially in urban areas. The author has identified the presence of the relative perfect, the truncated perfect and plus quamperfect – existing in parallel, as complete or incomplete syntactic synonyms. There is a high frequency of the narrative present, but also forms that are in retreat in the modern language – the imperfect and aorist, and the presence of modes, imperatives and potentials, used with temporal meaning – which give the narration a specific stylistic mark.
More...