The significance of the semantic range of the term ἀρχή in the thought of sixth century Greek philosophers analysed on the basis of the meanings of certain words containing the ἀρχ- root in early Greek poetry

Author(s): Maciej Roszkowski / Language(s): English Issue: 9/2014

The aim of this paper is to present a classification of the meanings of the term ἀρχή in literary sources up to the sixth century B.C., when the first philosophers, i.e. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes appeared. Although ἀρχή has been a topic of discussion at least from the times of John Burnet who denied the possibility of its having been an original Presocratic term and insisted that it was only a word, used by Aristotle and his followers for the principle of the early Greek philosophers, I feel that this matter did not get its fair share of attention. To allow for a better understanding of the semantic range of the term ἀρχή, I investigate the presented analysis of various meanings of certain words with the ἀρχ- root, most notably ἄρχειν (ind praes. act. ἄρχω) from whose verb-stem the noun ἀρχή is formed. This paper does not make a claim for a decisive argument in the discussion of the term ἀρχή by the early Greek philosophers but only analyses the semantic range of this and other words with the same root. The aim is to determine if such an investigation will shed some light on the reasons why the term was adopted for in the Presocratic philosophy.

Interpretacja pojęcia munus w Konstytucji dogmatycznej o Kościele Lumen gentium

Author(s): Anna Słowikowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 08/2015

The purpose of this article is interpretation of the notion of munus in the Constitution Lumen gentium and enclosed with this document the Preliminary Note of Explanation.The Latin noun munus is an ambiguous word. In the teaching of the Second Vatican Council this word is present up 255 times, whereof 55 times in the Constitution Lumen gentium. The Council Fathers used this term in the meaning of: “office”, “function”, “mission”, “service”, “task”, “obligation”, “ministry”. In many places the translations of constitution from Latin language into Polish language in 1968 and 2002 are different. This can cause not only problems of interpretation, but also doctrinal problems.

Les verbes garantir et assurer et leurs équivalents polonais dans le texte constitutionnel contemporain d’un état et dans Gaudium et spes (1965)

Author(s): Dorota Śliwa / Language(s): French Issue: 08/2015

The article contains a detailed analysis of the verbs garantir and assurer and their evivalents in Polish gwarantować, zapewniać i zabezpieczyć extracted from the normative texts, which are national constitutions and the constitution of the Catholic Church. As modal deontological verbs of assurance they are used in specialized texts. The study of the relationship between the type of a constitutional text and the choice of verbs of assurance in the language of the original indicates that both the syntactic structure and the meaning of those verbs are characteristic of a given type of text. The reflection over the choice of those verbs in translated texts leads to the conclusion that it is worthwhile to re-think the use of equivalents in the translated text according to the redaction style appropriate for a given normative text. Detailed illustrations of bilingual contexts of comparable texts as well as of parallel ones also aim at pointing out to computer linguistics specialists certain issues appearing during encoding and which arise from the transformation of whole phrases containing a verb of assurance during the translation process along with the consequences resulting from the choice of the de re or de dicto modality.

Polonistička veza Julija Benešića i Zdenke Marković

Author(s): Ana Batinić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 08/2015

Being a private form of communication, personal letters are usually not written to be published. The act of their publication, therefore, may be considered as somewhat voyeuristic. However, since the authors of the correspondence in this contribution – Julije Benešić and Zdenka Marković – are two public figures of great importance not only in Croatian literary and cultural context, but also in the promotion of Croatian Polish studies as well as intercultural relations between Croatia and Poland in the first half of the twentieth century, we believe that its printing is justified. Their correspondence may be considered as an interesting addition to the facts about their lives and work that can be found in different research papers and books published so far, providing insight in the inner world of thoughts and emotions they shared.

Národní korpusy a polsko-česká/česko-polská překladová lexikografie

Author(s): Andrzej Charciarek / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2015

The article describes the role which national corpora can and should play in creating the great Polish-Czech/ Czech-Polish dictionary. The article analyses functions of the language corpora in preparing single and multi-word dictionary entries in an e-dictionary. Concrete examples have been used for the purposes of the detailed analysis of polysemy and homonymy in the process of creating dictionary entries. Also, the methodology of monolingual lexicography (e.g. identifiers and definitions) is presented in the description of dictionary entries (words or phrasemes) in the dictionary. Particular focus is put on creating dictionary entry structure and using the national corpora. Some concrete examples have been used to illustrate selectivity and incompleteness in the description of lexical unit meanings found in dictionaries not based on the texts from the language corpora. The article emphasises the significance of language corpora in creating entries as they are a useful source of frequency data in creating dictionary entries. The article is based on the corpus data from the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) and the Czech National Corpus (ČNK).

Juuksed, naise uhkuse kroon Krunn

Author(s): Meeli Sedrik / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 61/2015

The article addresses the origin of the word krunn ‘hair bun’ and its synonyms in Estonian dialects. Previously, an Estonian­Swedish loan etymology has been suggested for krunn, < krún, which implies that an irregular phonological change took place in the borrowing. This explanation was suspect due to the meaning correspondence between the source language and the target language. In the past, hair buns were typically covered by headwear, so it is not likely that there would have been reason to give them a name motivated by the comparison to a crown. In order to find a possible single basis for the naming of this hair style, I identified the synonyms of Krunn in Estonian dialects. Among the synonyms analyzed, two groups stand out, wherein the primary meaning (in addition to denoting the hair style) was 1) something small and round or 2) a bunch/bundle of flax, hemp, or similar. Loan etymologies are presented for the synonyms nukk, null, nuul (Finnish­Swedish loans), nuut (from Swedish and German) and tutt (a Baltic German loan). Krunn could be an Estonian­Swedish loan, the source being the stem runn, meaning ‘round’ (of objects). The word­initial consonant cluster has emerged as a result of hypercorrection.

Un mot (même pas ?), deux mots... une phrase ? Le problème de la définition et de l’élément central dans la phrase (perspective contrastive polono-française)

Author(s): Joanna Górnikiewicz / Language(s): French Issue: 15/2015

The goal of this research proposal is to present the criteria used to define a sentence in French and Polish reference works. The discussion also focuses on the central element and the minimal formation of a sentence in these two languages. Accordingly, there are two concurrent conceptions described which are more or less widely adopted by scientists and researchers: the “diktat” of the verb and the partnership between the verb and its subject.

Latīņu salikteņi un to tulkošanas iespējas latviešu valodā

Author(s): Gita Bērziņa / Language(s): Latvian Issue: 6/2015

Like in many languages, compounding is one of the usual word-formation patterns also in the Latin language. By compounding, the Latin vocabulary is supplemented with lexical units that reflect multiform concepts of complex meaning, explicit translation of which in another language, including Latvian, is often a complicated challenge.The paper discusses the dominant models of Latin compounding and the translation possibilities of various Latin compounds in Latvian. Latin compounds in verbal and in nominal system have developed from different syntactic word groups and various stems of nouns, adjectives, numerals, and verbs, including also adverbs and prepositions which are used for their formation. By combining two or more parts in one lexical unit, the components can either change their form or remain unchanged and the meaning can be modified or it remains as it was.A great part of Latin compounds, including denotations of specific notions, belongs to common vocabulary devoid of any stylistic or emotional expressivity. However, compounding has also a significant stylistic potential manifesting itself convincingly in various texts of different literary genres. The translation of these units is the most difficult challenge.

Ciešamā kārta latviešu un angļu zinātniskajā rakstu valodā

Author(s): Vita Kalnberzina / Language(s): Latvian Issue: 6/2015

The article compares the use of the passive voice in the English and Latvian academic writing, first examining the diachronic research and the traditions of the use of the passive voice in Latvian and English, then the frequency of the use of some of the passive voice verbs in Latvian and English Google data base and finally examining the instructions of Latvian, British, Canadian and the US University guidelines for the writers of dissertations. The findings suggest that the attitude of the English academic writing instructors and editors is in striking contrast to Latvian academic writing instructors, which has resulted in the differences in the frequencies of the use of the verbs in the passive voice in the edited articles data base (Google Scholar). The reasons for the difference would need further research.

Constituents of Spatial Adpositional Phrases in Latvian and Mandarin Chinese

Author(s): Marija Nikolajeva / Language(s): Latvian Issue: 6/2015

The article focuses on the syntactic and semantic aspects of the constituents of spatial adpositional phrases in Latvian and Mandarin Chinese. While studying the elements of the spatial expressions, one can discover that the properties of prepositions and nouns differ in Latvian and Mandarin Chinese. As a result, the constructions formed for describing spatial relations in the two languages are typologically different. The Chinese localizers are equivalent to Latvian prepositions, adverbs and nouns. The position of the spatial phrase affects the grammatical meaning of the sentence in Chinese and the pragmatic meaning in Latvian. In Latvian, prepositions and cases are polysemous – each may perform several semantic roles. Chinese prepositions are not polysemous in this sense.

Trešās personas vietniekvārdi „Līdzsvarotajā mūsdienu latviešu valodas korpusā” un zinātniskajos rakstos angļu valodā

Author(s): Zigrida Vinčela / Language(s): Latvian Issue: 6/2015

The use of the third person pronouns differs in the Latvian and English languages if the pronoun antecedents are the nouns that denote a broad mixed-sex human group. The nouns that refer individually to a broad human group are labelled by Latvian linguists as false generic nouns and they traditionally follow the masculine gender inflection pattern and thus involve the use of generic he (all its forms). In the English language, there is no inflectional category for the gender of nouns, so the gender is signalled by the third person singular pronouns (he, his, him, himself for the male antecedents and she her, hers, herself for the female antecedents). As the English language does not have a sex-neutral third person singular pronoun, the generic he has been traditionally used in the cases when a noun refers individually to a broad mixed-sex group of humans. However, during the last four decades the generic he has been questioned because it is often perceived to be male and thus implies discriminatory pronoun use in favour of males. In order to explore the generic pronoun use in the English language a set of examples was extracted from three open-access journals containing articles in applied linguistics. The analysis of examples shows that the authors have avoided the use of generic he that has been replaced by coordinated pronoun forms (he or she; he/she), the combination s/he or the use they as a generic pronoun. However, the choice of generic he alternatives varies not only across the journals, but also in the articles belonging to one journal. The examples extracted from The Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian (BCML) show that the nouns used in the contexts in which they denote a broad mixed-sex human group are used in masculine, and consequently serve as antecedents for the pronoun he.

ОБРАЗЫ СОВЕТСКОЙ ЭПОХИ: ФРАГМЕНТЫ СЛОВАРЯ ОБЪЕКТОВ СРАВНЕНИЙ

Author(s): Mary Krylova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 5/2012

The article deals the ratio of of modern linguistic personality to the period of of Soviet power by analyzing the use of images of the Soviet era in the comparisons. Modern language personality is characterized a dual (positive and negative) perception objects associated with the Soviet era. Most recalls the bad things in past era: the cult of personality, collectivization, the era of stagnation, poverty, scarcity of goods, etc.

Estonian Lotfitka Romani and its contact languages

Author(s): Anette Ross / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

The Estonian Lotfitka dialect is a Romani dialect whose speakers have migrated from Latvia to Estonia. This article provides an overview of the recent and current contact languages of the Estonian Lotfitka dialect – Latvian, Russian and Estonian – and draws attention to some of the contact-induced language changes. To provide a comprehensive insight into the intensity and scope of borrowing I have applied Thomason and Kaufman’s borrowing scale to categorize the contact languages. The relevant features behind the contact-induced changes that appear in Estonian Lotfitka dialect are listed.

МОРФОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ СРЕДСТВА СОЗДАНИЯ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОГО ОБРАЗА В КОНТЕКСТЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ ЭСТЕТИКИ ЯЗЫКОВЫХ ЕДИНИЦ

Author(s): Gulshat Ahmathanovna Khairutdinova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 5/2013

The article deals with aesthetics of language units and explores aesthetic resources of morphological means used to create artistic imagery in a literary text. Considerable attention is paid to the characteristics of the morphological units associated with the implementation of the aesthetic potential of grammatical gender of nouns. The results of the research disprove the traditional assessment of morphological tools as purely structural elements that give a language only a minimum of initial ordering.

Сочинительные стратегии энецкого языка

Author(s): Olga V. Khanina / Language(s): Russian Issue: 02 (21)/2016

The paper gives a description of conjunctive coordination in Enets (both Forest and Tundra dialects) based on a corpus of natural texts. It discusses both indigenous Uralic strategies, including juxtaposition, a particle with the main meaning ‘again, also, but’, collective Dual, and double Comitative, as well as strategies based on elements borrowed from Russian, i.e. on conjunctions i, da, a. The strategies with juxtaposition, indigenous particle meaning "again, also, but", and i, borrowed from Russian, are considered main, while all the other strategies are called marginal, with the former being substantially more frequent than the latter. Syntactic properties of the main coordination strategies are studied in detail, i.e. syntactic types of coordinated elements and cross-reference of coordinated subjects and objects on the verb. A special attention is given to the semantic distribution of the main strategies: they are shown to form a hierarchy correlating with a scale from natural/expected to unnatural/unexpected coordination; besides, it turns out that the parameter of morphological homogenity is also relevant for the Enets coordination. The data are studied against a typological background, which allows to highlight rare features specific to Enets, as well as to spot cross-linguistically common phenomena. Formal properties of Enets coordination strategies are unexpectedly diverse as compared to other languages of the world: this can be explained by intermarriage of features inherited from Uralic and those borrowed from a structurally different Russian.

UNITED NATIONS RULE OF LAW, “COMMON LANGUAGE OF JUSTICE” AND THE POST-2015 EDUCATIONAL AGENDA: SOME ACADEMIC AND POLICY ASPECTS

Author(s): Sławomir Redo / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2013

This interdisciplinary article first discusses some theoretical precepts of language and logic, then contextualizes them for the application of the United Nations (UN) Rule of Law. Next it argues that, while the international English language used in the Organization reflects specific national legal reasonings, the UN, by its nature, should harmonize Western and Eastern ways of thinking as they both contribute to the UN multivalent logic pursued for progressive ends. In conclusion, the article emphasizes that, notwithstanding the rather limited UN capacity for directly responding to educational justice needs across the world, UN rule-of-law evidence-driven recommendations and policies should have a more effective impact on justice education at all levels in the post-2015 UN Rule of Law agenda than they currently do.

Dažas gramatiskas pārmaiņas lībiešu valodā latviešu valodas ietekmē

Author(s): Valts Ernštreits,Gunta Kļava / Language(s): Latvian Issue: 3/2013

The article provides an insight into the process of various grammatical changes in Livonian developed by the prolonged contact situation with Latvian. Livonian is strongly influenced by the Latvian at different levels due to the close and endured contact between the speakers of two languages, it is necessary to note that speakers of Livonian were bilinguals for a long time. It is clear that Livonian has affected Latvian in similar way. The process of mutual borrowings can be observed in the vocabulary most clearly; however, there are changes that have occurred in the phonetics and grammar as well. The influence of Latvian resulted in the changes of Livonian case system – disappearance of exterior locative cases and formation of dative, merging of translative and comitative and formation of instrumental; development of prefixes from inherited words; composition of negation; formation of passive voice; and the rising of articles. One should be noted that linguistically correct knowledge of the ancient history of the Livonian language is not sufficient in terms of volume.

Съдържание на годишнина XL (2015) на списание Съпоставително езикознание

Author(s): Ina Mihaylova / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 4/2015

Конструкции прилагательных с компонентом ДЛЯ РОД

Author(s): Galina Ivanovna Kustova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 6/2016

The article deals with two kinds of adjective constructions with the same structures (A for Gen S), but different semantics – argument construction and comparative construction. The meaning of comparative construction: feature is atypical for a given object or class of objects: zharkiy dlya oseni den’ (‘hot day for autumn’). Comparative construction has implication: the opposite feature is typical. In argument construction dlya Rod (‘for Gen’) is argument, i.e. par-ticipant of the situation, denoted by adjective: neozhidanny dlya nas rezul’tat (‘unexpected re-sult for us’). Many adjectives have both constructions: neubeditelnye dlya nas dovody (‘unconvincing arguments for us’) – argument construction, dlya nas – participant of the situation; neubeditelnye dovody dlya takogo opytnogo advokata (‘unconvincing arguments for such an experienced lawyer’) – comparative construction. Dlyaconstruction is universal construction for adjectives (cf. Genitive for nouns). Dlya-construction expresses a wide set of meanings.

Структура прагматического макрокомпонента значения (на материале группы слов, обозначающих национальность)

Author(s): Marina Aleksandrovna Lappo / Language(s): Russian Issue: 6/2016

The research under scrutiny develops the ideas of integral theory of lexical meaning and a number of studies on the structure of the pragmatic macrocomponent (Yu. D. Apresyan, G. N. Sklyarevskaya, V. N. Telia, E. Yu. Bulygina, T. A. Tripolskaya). In order to identify the structure of the pragmatic macrocomponent of ethnonyms a complex of methods was used: comparison of lexicographical dictionaries’ strategies of different periods and study of the Russian National Corpus. The investigation involves "Dictionary of Russian language" edited by D. N. Ushakov (19351940), "Dictionary of Modern Russian literary language", edited by V. I. Chernysheva (19481965), "Dictionary of the Russian Language" edited by A. P. Evgeneva (19811984), dictionaries and encyclopedias of different periods of time and about 2,000 con-texts from the Corpus.The purpose of this article is to describe the structure of the pragmatic component of eth-nonyms, the ways of fixing this semantics in dictionaries and realization in the modern Russian discourse. It is established, firstly, that academic Russian dictionaries present ethnonyms as neutral lexemes in the interpretation area, and in some cases in the illustration area a pragmat-ic context is applied. Ideological microcomponent is often revealed while comparing dictionaries of different time periods. Secondly, the structure of the pragmatic macrocomponent of nomi-nations on the national basis includes estimating microcomponents and ideological values. In its turn, the ideological microcomponent includes such components as closeness, farness, alienness, hostility, and evaluation microcomponent includes such components as developed / undeveloped nation, which determines its position in the scale of prestige, usefulness and / or ac-cepting – a kind of ranking of nations. The level of development is supported by a set of particular judgments (ethical and rational), representing national stereotypes.