Free not-so-free adjectival order in Latin

Author(s): Giuliana Giusti / Language(s): English,Latin Issue: 24/2019

Latin is known to have free Modifier > N / N > Modifier orders, with different frequencies according to the nature of the Modifier, which can be a determiner, a quantifier or an adjective. This variation raises a number of questions on the source of optionality, in both configurational and non-configurational approaches. In this paper, I take the configurational stance as the more restrictive and therefore the first to pursue. I evaluate two recent competing hypotheses: Cinque’s (1994, 2005, 2010) cartographic anti-symmetric hypothesis, according to which adjectives only occur as left-branching specifiers, and Abels and Neeleman’s (2010) minimalist counterproposal, according to which adjectives are adjoined to NP and stacked leftwards or rightwards. I propose a reconciliation of these two generative approaches along the lines of Giusti (2015), who distinguishes three types of feature sharing: Agreement, Concord, and Projection. The optionality of order is derived through (i) optional realization of N in the functional spine, (ii) optional realization of possessives in first-merge or remerge position, (iii) optional left/right adjunction of reduced relative clauses (or alternatively optional partial movement across a left-branching indirect modification); (iv) possible displacements of a single AP to the Left Periphery of the nominal expression. These four options interact with discourse but are constrained by the configurational right-branching structure generated by the syntactic component.

Diana Maria Diaconescu, Terminologie creștină românească în perspectivă romanică. Studiu lingvistic, Iași, Editura ARS LONGA, 2014

Author(s): TOMASZ KLIMKOWSKI / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 64/2015

Sajnovics’s Demonstratio (1770) A linguistic treatise based on methods of natural sciences

Author(s): Zsuzsa Vladár / Language(s): English Issue: 46/2022

Sajnovics János (1733–1785) was the author of the basic work of comparative linguistics (Demonstratio 1770), which is considered the first scientific demonstration of the affinity of Hungarian and a Finno-Ugric language, Saami. This work was created on the occasion of the 1769 astronomical expedition in Denmark as unplanned side research. After the expedition the leader, Maximilian Hell reported on the transition of Venus (Transitio Veneris) and his assistant, János Sajnovics on the Hungarian– Lappish linguistic identity (Demonstratio).1 This paper will deal with the scientific research methodology of Demonstratio comparing it with the methodology applied in Hell’s astronomical treatise. We also consider some contemporary critics of the methodology of Demonstratio.

Bringing constructed languages back to the debate: The contributions of interlinguistics to general linguistics

Author(s): Guilherme Fians / Language(s): English Issue: 46/2022

In the first half of the twentieth century, the fields of interlinguistics and Esperanto studies emerged as branches of linguistics focused on the study of languages designed for international communication (such as Volapük, Esperanto, and Ido). Yet, why are there specific fields to study language creation and why should linguists care about this? Looking at the history of constructed languages, this article explores the institutionalization of interlinguistics by focusing on the history of the Centre for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (CED, in its Esperanto acronym), a research center founded in 1952 whose developments encapsulate certain aspects of this broader narrative. From an analysis of CED’s 44th Esperanto Studies Conference, in 2022, I flesh out the potential of interlinguistics to contribute back to linguistics and to the humanities disciplines that originated it. Ultimately, this article calls for the reinsertion of constructed languages into general linguistics debates.

PRODUCTIVITY AND FREQUENCY OF SOME LATINATE VERB PREFIXES IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN

Author(s): Jasna Jurišić Roljić / Language(s): English Issue: 27/2023

The Latin language was the Lingua Franca of the ancient world, and the precursor of Romance languages. As such, it had a huge influence on European languages, and we can find elements of Latin both in English and in Serbian. In this paper, four Latinate verb prefixes with spatial and temporal meanings have been examined, and those are: trans-, re-, intra-, and post-, and their frequencies and productivities in both languages have been calculated. The analysis was made on the English corpus BNCweb, and the Serbian corpus srWaC, based on the hypothesis that these prefixes would be more frequent and productive in English, which was more exposed to Latin and Romance languages.

AKTY ZAPROSZEŃ W POLSKO- I ROSYJSKOJĘZYCZNYCH WIADOMOŚCIACH PRZESYŁANYCH NA KARTACH POCZTOWYCH

Author(s): Daniel Dzienisiewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 180/2022

The aim of the article is to analyze Polish and Russian speech acts of invitation sent on postcards in the second half of the 20th century. Although invitations have been the subject of considerable linguistic interest so far, speech acts of invitation observed in postcard messages per se have not been studied yet. The study concerns the location of speech acts of invita- tion in the structure of postcard messages, their formal and pragmatic features, as well as their pre- and postpositional context. The analysis proves that speech acts of invitation usually serve as an additional element of the Polish messages, while the Russian invitations occupy more central positions. It has also been shown that direct speech acts of invitation are rarely found in both languages. In contrast, indirect speech acts of invitation are utilized more frequently and they commonly take on the form of sentences with imperative verb forms.

THE INTERACTION OF ORTHOGRAPHY, PERCEPTION, AND PHONOLOGY IN THE ADAPTATION OF E /Ɜ:/ IN LOANWORDS INTO RUSSIAN

Author(s): Kateryna Laidler / Language(s): English Issue: 181/2023

In the process of loanword nativization, foreign sounds are inevitably altered so as to comply with the phonological principles of the borrowing language. There is, however, an ongoing debate as to whether such modifications are attributable to the phonological similarity between the source and the target segments, their acoustic closeness, orthographic conven- tions of the languages involved or an impact of additional extralinguistic factors. The issue seems particularly relevant in the case of those sounds whose adaptation to the target language involves several changes. The present paper deals with the issue of the so-called British English long schwa adaptation in loanwords from English into Russian. E /ɜ:/ nativiza- tion poses an interesting research problem due to its lacking a single phonologically or phonetically closest equivalent in Russian. Thus, considerable variability can be observed in how it is adapted. The present paper aims to examine the major mechanisms and patterns of E /ɜ:/ nativization in Russian loanwords and shed some light on the interplay of phonology, acoustic similarity, and orthography. Towards this goal, the major adaptation scenarios of 200 established loanwords con- taining E /ɜ:/ have been compared to the results of an online experiment in which 41 native speakers of Russian with no. command of English listened to a list of English words containing the sound in question in different segmental contexts and were asked to transcribe them using Cyrillic characters. The analysis demonstrates that while established loanwords are often influenced by orthography, spelling-based adaptations are inevitably reinforced by phonology and in some cases acoustic similarity. Moreover, a number of such adaptations is marginal if they are not supported by either phonology or phonetics, and the most common substitutes show an interplay of all three factors. Hence, our findings shed some light onto the nature of /ɜ:/ nativization in the Russian language as well as add to the debate of the loanword adaptation phenomena in general.

ДВЕ РАНЕ ТУРСКЕ ПОЗАЈМЉЕНИЦЕ У СЛОВЕНСКИМ ЈЕЗИЦИМА – ЈАРАК И ЈАРУГА

Author(s): Snežana Petrović / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 2/2022

This paper offers an overview of various etymologies of the Serbian words jarak and jaruga in etymological dictionaries and scientific articles. The Serbian material is then compared with the corresponding words and their interpretations in other Slavic and neighbouring languages. Based on the etymological analysis, the chronology of attestations, and the areal distribution of lexemes, it is considered whether jarak and jaruga are two related words originating from the same Turkic base – one being derived by a diminutive and the other by an augmentative suffix of Slavic origin (-ak and -uga, respectively), or whether they are two independent loanwords, whose etymons are two unrelated Turkish lexemes.

NEKA: HOW MACEDONIAN DIFFERS FROM BOTH BULGARIAN AND THE FORMER SERBO-CROATIAN

Author(s): Victor A. Friedman / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

The Common Slavic particle that is realized in sub-Alpine South Slavic as neka has distinctive developments in Macedonian, Bulgarian, and the former Serbo-Croatian. The particle has its broadest usage in the former Serbo-Croatian, which appears to be, at least in part, due to contacts with Italo-Romance. Macedonian is more conservative than Bulgarian, and thus occupies a unique place within sub-Alpine South Slavic. At the same time, Bulgarian is less Balkan than Macedonian in that the latter permits a bare direct object without a verb.

FONETIKA VS FONOLOGIJA: NA PRIMERIMA VOKALSKIH SISTEMA FRANCUSKOG, ŠPANSKOG, ITALIJANSKOG I RUMUNSKOG JEZIKA

Author(s): Snežana Gudurić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 24/2023

The paper deals with the relationship between phonetics and phonology using examples from the vowel systems of four Roman languages – French, Spanish, Italian, and Romanian. Starting from the principles of the Prague Linguistic Cicrle and N. Trubetzkoy’s Phonology Theory, which built his theory of phonetics as a discipline studying the material of physical aspects of minimal linguistic units as speech elements and using the methodology of natural sciences, and of phonology as a discipline concerned with the distributive properties of a limited number of minimal linguistic units i.e. phonemes, elements belonging to language and which applies methodologies specific to linguistics, sociology and psychology in its research. A comparative analysis of the vowel systems of the four Roman languages revealed different approaches in classifying identical or very similar vocal realizations, but also similarities in their nature. The research showed that complex systems tend to be less stable and tend to reduce, while simpler ones are more stable. Certain allophonic realizations in one or more languages appear as full-fledged phonemes in the system of another language, whereas some other realizations, present in spontaneous speech but not in the phonological system of a specific language, emerge as phonemic units in another language.

The Conceptual Relationships in N+N Compounds in Arabic Compared to English

Author(s): Abdel Rahman Mitib Altakhaineh / Language(s): English Issue: 23/2023

The current study investigates the semantic or conceptual relations that exist between two compound elements in Arabic based on the theoretical framework of Conceptual Semantics and a modified version of Parallel Architecture called Relational Morphology (RM). It also explores the similarities and/or differences between these relations and those identified by Jackendoff pertaining to English compounds. To this end, a corpus of Arabic compounds was collected and analysed to identify the type of conceptual basis on which both lexicalised and novel compounds are formed in Arabic. The analysis revealed that all conceptual relations found between elements of English compounds can also be found in Arabic, yet the direction of the head was different in the latter. The analysis also demonstrated that Arabic compounds exhibit other types of conceptual relations which were not mentioned by Jackendoff. It is suggested that both regular stored lexicalised compounds that have idiosyncratic interpretations and novel compounds (with the majority being formed based on Synthetic Genitive Construction) can be reconciled under the approach of Relational Morphology, as they can be generated by the same compound schema.

PREDLOŠKO-PADEŽNE KONSTRUKCIJE SA SEMANTIČKOM KOMPONENTOM UNUTRAŠNJOSTI U SRPSKOM I SLOVENAČKOM JEZIKU

Author(s): Ana Ž. Samardžić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 3/2013

This work deals with the synchronical description of prepositional case constructions with the semantic component of the interior in Serbian and Slovenian. The examples used for analysis are excerpted from the novel Besnilo, by Borislav Pekic, written in Serbian and its translation into Slovenian, Steklina. The aim of contrasting the prepositional case constructions subsystem of these two languages is the identification of similarities and differences in the expression of semantic features within the prepositional case constructions with a spatial meaning on the paradigmatical level, while the translation equivalents are being analyzed on the syntagmatic level. The analysis points out that there are no bigger differences in the distribution of prepositional case constructions with the semantic component of the interior in Serbian and Slovenian. The use of the corresponding construction can be conditioned by the lexical meaning of the noun within prepositional case construction, the meaning of the verb and its valency, and also by its morphemic composition.

ПОУКИТЕ И СОВЕТИТЕ КАКО ОДРАЗ НА СВЕТОГЛЕДОТ НА ЛИКОВИТЕ ВО МАКЕДОНСКИОТ ПРЕВОД НА ВРАЌАЊЕТО НА КРАЛОТ

Author(s): Kristina Dimovska / Language(s): Macedonian Issue: 28/2023

This paper was a continuation of the methodological approach and an extension to the interpretational interest and strategy from its predecessor published in the journal Context no. 26/2022 that focused on vol. 2 of The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien. The main accent in this paper was put on various paremiological forms, namely on forms that have the function of advices and wisdom utterances in vol. 3 od the trilogy (The Return of the King). By exploring and by interpreting these types of paremiological forms, we tried to grasp the worldview of the different characters, in the attempt to show that certain utterances are typical, but not exclusive, for and to certain characters. For an example, even in the Two Towers we encountered wisdom utterances by Sam, Frodo’s friend, a character who is not exactly an epitome, nor a representation of exceptional intelligence, unmatched providence or intellectual cunningness. But, the notion that he atypically uses utterances that are not characteristic for him, makes these utterances even greater in meaning and proves that the reader and the interpreter cannot always guess what type of an utterance this or similar character might use, keeping the element of surprise alive and active. The point was to show that every character has a unique worldview which is described through the types of utterances he or she makes but that wisdom also can be uttered by atypical characters who are not necessarily presented as being particularly wise, like Sam for instance.

Mubi-Toram lexicon and Afro-Asiatic II: Addenda with *b-

Author(s): Gábor Takács / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

The paper is part of a planned longer series designed to step by step reveal the Chadic and wider Afro-Asiatic heritage in the lexical stock of the Mubi-Toram languages which represent the easternmost (26th or 27th)[1] group of the vaste Chadic (i.e., 6th) branch of the gigantic Afro-Asiatic family.

Mubi-Toram lexicon and Afro-Asiatic IV: Addenda with *b- (Part 2)

Author(s): Gábor Takács / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

The paper is another part of a planned longer series designed to step by step reveal the Chadic and wider Afro-Asiatic cognate heritage in the lexical stock of the Mubi-Toram languages which represent the easternmost (26th) group of the vaste Chadic (i.e., 6th) branch of the gigantic Afro-Asiatic family.

Conceptual metaphors in Hungarian and Bulgarian banking terminology

Author(s): Neli Dömötöri / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

The current paper offers a contrastive conceptual analysis of Hungarian and Bulgarian banking terminology through public documents issued by the Hungarian OTP Bank and the Bulgarian DSK Bank. The qualitative research shows that Hungarian uses authentic indigenous words and the cognitive images behind them are presumably transparent to native speakers of Hungarian. In Bulgarian, on the contrary, the majority of terms are loan words from foreign languages, especially English, and the conceptual metaphors underlying them are not carried over to Bulgarian. At the same time, both languages are characterized by the MONEY IS A LIQUID metaphor as well as BANKING INSTITUTIONS ARE FAMILIES and BANKING INSTITUTIONS ARE PLANTS metaphors. Both languages exhibit creativity in the use of miscellaneous terms related to banking transactions.

CATEGORIA COMPARAŢIEI ÎN LIMBILE ROMANICE

Author(s): Delia Maria SILIŞTE / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 15/2008

Les langues romanes gardent la structure sémantique de la comparaison du latin classique, mais elles continuent le latin populaire en ce qui concerne le moyen analytique d’exprimer les degrés de comparaison. Le comparatif de supériorité se forme dans les langues romanes avec les succésseurs des adverbes magis et plus. Le comparatif d’infériorité et celui d’égalité utilisent des modalités d’expression multiples, mais surtout le superlatif a enrichi les formes avec des expressions à valeur de superlatif et des constructions exclamatives.

COMMENT COMPARER LES FORMULES EXPRESSIVES DE LA CONVERSATION : LE CAS DE FAUT PAS POUSSER ET SON ÉQUIVALENT POLONAIS BEZ PRZESADY

Author(s): Anna Krzyżanowska / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2023

The main aim of this article is to highlight discrepancies and similarities in the structuring and use of the French expressive conversational formula faut pas pousser and its Polish equivalent bez przesady. The use of a descriptive model based on a set of relevant formal, pragmatic-semantic, discourse, affective and socio-cultural parameters made it possible to show in which speech acts, depending on the respective contexts, the formulae being compared are involved.

CATÉGORISATION CONCEPTUELLE DES NOMS DE PAIN EN POLOGNE ET STRATÉGIES APPLIQUÉES À LEUR TRADUCTION EN FRANÇAIS

Author(s): Muriel Waterlot / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2023

The aim of this article is threefold. Firstly, we will develop conceptual categories for the different types of bread offered by a “star” bakery in Poland known for its wide range of breads. We propose the analysis of bread names composed of the word bread (N) and nouns (N) or adjec- tives derived from nouns (ADJ) that designate e.g. intrinsic properties ([basic] ingredients, shape or appearance), location (spatial-geographical criteria), Polish culture (cultural criteria), history (historical criteria: historical figures or events), and others. Secondly, we will analyse existing Polish-French translations of bread names we found on the website of an international Polish bakery, which could be categorised in the same conceptual categories and subcategories which were defined in the first stage of our research. The analysis of translations will be based on the taxonomy of translation strategies developed by Diederik Gritt (1997) and Andrew Chesterman (2000). The third objective is to assess the relevance and applicability of machine translation, more precisely by the application Chrome, for bread names belonging to certain (sub)categories by comparing them with existing translations.

Regionalne różnice leksykalne w potocznej świadomości językowej

Author(s): Renata Kucharzyk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2023

The subject of the article is the attitude of naïve language users to the broadly identified phenomenon of regional lexical diversity, including all lexical units limited to a specific territory, regardless of their status (regionalism, micro-regionalism, dialectism). The considerations are based on meta-linguistic comments of the Internet users posted on on- line forums devoted to regional distinctiveness.