Formy fleksyjne czasowników a formy wypowiedzi w idiostylu naukowym Joachima Lelewela

Author(s): Violetta Jaros / Language(s): Polish Issue: XI/2015

The present paper is devoted to inflectional verb forms present in various ways of language communication in Joachim Lelewel’s scholar writings. In particular ways of language communication (speech microacts), all of which are semantically and functionally independent units and constitute to the holistic structure of scholar writing (macroact) Lelewel applies different morphological verb forms used to create i.a. specific metatextual constructions, constructions structurising historical narrative, receiver-recipient relation indicators which pursue informative-verifying as well as emotive-axiological strategies.

Stylizacja potoczna w powieści kryminalnej Ewy Ostrowskiej "Bez wybaczenia" (zagadnienia leksykalne)

Author(s): Marzena Forma / Language(s): Polish Issue: XI/2015

The subject of my interest in this article is a lingual stylization at lexical level in the Polish detective novel entitled "Bez wybaczenia" by Ewa Ostrowska (2009). The analysis of the selected text allows to distinguish numerous indicators of lingual colloquialism in the stylistic-lexical layer. The lingual stylization in the novel entitled "Bez wybaczenia" associates with an accumulation of lexemes and phraseology proper for a colloquial style. The efforts connected with colloquial linguistic stylization stem, to some extent, from genre feature of detective novel designed for mass audience. Pop culture of this prose was the reflection found on the language plane of the discussed work. The writer describes in her novel everyday problems and human experiences using the colloquial lingual means. These are: thickenings, diminutives, idioms, adjectives, and comparisons.

Charakteryzacja językowa postaci młodzieżowych w powieści Ludmiły Marjańskiej "Pierwsze śniegi, pierwsze wiosny" (wybrane zagadnienia)

Author(s): Iwona Skrzypczyk-Gałkowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: XI/2015

The object of my interest of this literary sketch is language characterization of young characters in the novel "First snows, first springs" by L. Marjańska. This work presents young people from Częstochowa in the last year of the interwar period and during the first three years of the World War II. In the novel L. Marjańska makes language stylization which underlines the belonging of the young people to the school environment. The language of characters is styled according to a nationwide pattern of contemporary language material and enriched with vocabulary of environmental groups. Language stylization in "First snows, first springs" performs many functions. First of all, the world becomes more concrete and plastic and the school environment – more colorful. In this way, it can be presented possibly the most believable picture of reality, years 1938–1942.

Limba română vorbită în gramaticile din Austria: Ioan Piuariu-Molnar, Gramatică germano-română (1788)

Author(s): Adrian Chircu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 69/2020

In his study, the author proposes a discussion upon the spoken Romanian language, as it was registered within the pages of a bilingual grammar appeared in Wien at the end of the 18th century, more exactly, in Ioan Piuariu-Molnar’s Gramatică germano-română (1788) ‘Romanian-German Grammar’. Beyond the descriptive characteristics of the grammar, within its pages, there is enclosed a range of conversational sentences (Some dialogues to express many ways of previous moods), where spoken language facts can be revealed, along the state of the Romanian language from that period, which can help us understand the most popular subjects or greetings of those times. Beside these aspects, the presenting method continues to be interesting, faithful sometimes to some models which overtook the Western Europe.

Câteva observaţii asupra folosirii termenului "vreme" în "Foletul novel"

Author(s): Andreea-Victoria Grigore / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 63/2014

The aim of this paper is to investigate occurrences of the meteorological term VREME (“WEATHER”) in Foletul novel, a series of calendars translated from Italian into Romanian during the reign of Constantin Brâncoveanu (1688-1714). Being included in an ongoing descriptive-linguistic research dedicated to the language of meteorology, the paper adopts a diachronic perspective of study. This perspective has been recently used in both foreign and Romanian researches, with interesting results in various terminologies (linguistics, mathematics, politics etc.). Consequently, early weather forecasts which end predictions in the aforementioned calendars are examined in the present paper, with further attention given to VREME, a fundamental terminological unit in meteorology. The close analysis identifies four main types of determiners which accompany the term under scrutiny. These determiners range from adjectives inherently related to the meteorological domain (e.g. noroasă “cloudy”, ploioasă “rainy”, senină “clear”) to adjectives with metaphorical meaning (e.g. melancolică “melancholic”, veselă “joyful”), as well as to qualifying adjectives or prepositional phrases. Moreover, different means of expressing the syntagm VREME INSTABILĂ (“UNSTEADY WEATHER”) are brought into discussion, while weather forecasts addressed to certain socio-professional categories are not omitted either.

AȚÂȚ (focul) ‘j’atisse le feu’ [370] in ALRR. SINTEZĂ

Author(s): Mădălina Spătaru-Pralea / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 63/2014

This article provides a brief etymological, phonological and geolinguistical analysis of the terms which designate the word AȚÂȚ (focul) ‘j’atisse le feu’ from the reference word list of the 2nd volume of "ALLR Sinteză" ("ALLR. Synthèse"). The linguistic data resulted from the reference list show a variety of lexical forms that point out the word AȚÂȚ. This variety can be explained by: the influence of the neighboring Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian in Moldavia, and Bulgarian in the south) and German in the western regions; the coexistence of Latin elements ("ațâț", "aprínd", "súflu") with those of foreign origin is the result of language contact established between Romanian populations and Slavic languages or German speakers. Many words are used with metonymical value.

Oliviu Felecan, Nicolae Felecan, Multum in parvo. Expresii şi citate latineşti adnotate, Cluj-Napoca, Editura MEGA, Editura ARGONAUT, 2013

Author(s): Iulia Barbu-Comaromi / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 63/2014

Verbele dicendi „reciproce” din limba română. Aspecte semantice şi sintactice

Author(s): Iulia Barbu Comaromi / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 70/2021

In this paper we focus on the verbs of saying in contemporary Romanian denoting conversation (symmetric verbal communication) between two or more speakers (e.g., a conversa, a dialoga, a discuta ‘to discuss, to conversate’, a negocia ‘to negotiate’, a flecări ‘to chatter’). There are differences between these verbs regarding their syntactic patterns, the grammatical voice, the register of usage (formal vs informal) and the functional styles they are specific to (belles-lettres, journalistic, scientific, and official style). A special type of writing is memoir, which resembles both belles-lettres and journalistic style. Important lexical semantic subclasses are well represented by conversational verbs expressing ’chatting’, ‘small talk’ (e.g., a bârfi ‘to chatter, to gossip’, a cleveti, a pălăvrăgi, a sporovăi, a trăncăni ‘to chatter, to blather’) and verbs denoting conflictive conversation (e.g., a se bălăcări, a se beșteli, a se ciondăni, a se ciorovăi, a se ocărî, a se rățoi, a se stropși), specific to colloquial register, especially with pejorative use.

Observaţii asupra limbii române. P. Nemoianu, Părerile unuia care n-a învăţat la şcoala românească

Author(s): Adrian Chircu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 72/2023

In his study, the author aims to discuss the ideas regained from the lines of few microtexts documented in the pages of a brochure, named Limba românească. Părerea unuia care n-a învăţat la şcoala românescă [The Romanian language. Opinions of someone who didn’t study at a Romanian school] and published by the politician P. Nemoianu. The fragments he selected are primarily linguistic, choosing several topics concerning the condition and the nature of Romanian language during the interwar period. These linguistic notes, somehow subjective, were not discussed in specialized studies until now, which determined us to investigate them furthermore. The main purpose of the analysis is to see which were the options in acquiring the Romanian language and how it was perceived in relation with other cultural languages (Latin or French, for example), in the aforementioned period.

Acoustic Correlates of Filler Particles in Romanian Connected Speech

Author(s): Oana NICULESCU / Language(s): English Issue: 2 (38)/2023

This paper explores a lesser studied topic in Romanian linguistic research related to the acoustic features (duration, pitch, F1/F2 values) and pragmatic functions of filler particles, often referred to as “filled pauses”, in spontaneous speech. From a theoretical perspective, we align our analysis with the recent definition proposed by Belz (2023), where “a phonetic exponent which is segmentally structured, semantically empty, syntactically unconstrained, and does not show an interjectional function is classified as a filler particle”. Moreover, as a way to reinforce the idea that filler particles are, from a phonetic perspective, extra-pausal phenomena, we classified fillers in terms of their positioning relative to the silent pause (i.e., pre-pausal, post-pausal, inter-pausal and concatenated). Prior to carrying out extensive quantitative analyses of filler particles on Romanian data, in this article we proposed performing an initial qualitative exploration of fillers in connected speech based on the Ro-Phon corpus. Our results reveal that: (1) the prototypical filler particle outputs in Romanian are vocalic (/ə, ɨ /), vocalic-nasal (/əm/) and nasal (/m/), (2) the length of the pause preceding a filler particle is systematically longer than the pause following it, (3) inter-pausal filler particles display the longest average duration while concatenated fillers were the shortest in our data, (4) in terms of formant frequencies, there is a greater degree of movement along the F1 axis compared to the average F2 frequencies extracted from both vocalic and vocalic-nasal tokens, indicative of an acoustic continuum present within the central vowels /ɨ/ and /ə/, (5) all fillers display a low, flat f0 contour, with a similar frequency as that of neighbouring phones, and that (6) filler particles perform various and often cumulative discursive roles, ranging from a cognitive function (indicative of planning processes), marker of a repair (self-initiated, content-based repairs), to a discourse management function used to signal upcoming new (sensitive) information within the narrative sequence. Future studies aim at extending the data and performing in-depth quantitative analyses related to duration, frequency distribution, voice and vowel quality of filler particles in non-pathological native and non-native Romanian speech data.

Jana Kocková: Neurčité tvary slovesné v češtině, ruštině a němčině a jejich vzájemná ekvivalence

Author(s): Petr Nádeníček / Language(s): Czech Issue: 28/2023

Review of: Kocková, Jana. Neurčité tvary slovesné v češtině, ruštině a němčině a jejich vzájemná ekvivalence. Vydání první. Praha: Academia, 2022. 274 stran. Práce Slovanského ústavu AV ČR. Nová řada; svazek 57. ISBN 978-80-200-3285-0.

ZU EINIGEN AUS DEM RUMÄNISCHEN UND UNGARISCHEN INS SIEBENBÜRGISCH-SÄCHSISCHE ENTLEHNTE KRANKEITSNAMEN UND EINIGE ZU IHRER HEILUNG VERWENDETE PFLANZENNAMEN

Author(s): Sigrid Haldenwang / Language(s): German Issue: 18/2011

The paper quotes a number of diseases whose names are borrowings from Romanian and Hungarian, including some names of medicinal plants. The names of the diseases are grouped according to certain criteria and then shown in their mother tongue in synonymous groups, illustrating the colorfulness of the Transylvanian-Saxon vocabulary.

Thematic Roles in Image Schemas. Part 2. A Missing Link from Reality to Mind

Author(s): Aleksander Szwedek / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2023

For a long time, Thematic roles have received much attention, raising many disputes and controversies, but they still remain a ‘murky construct’ (Newmeyer, 2010, Rissman and Majid, 2019). Dowty’s words of 1986 that “the perennial vexing problem is the lack of agreement among linguists as to which thematic roles exist, and the absence of any obvious way to decide this question”, still hold true. Departing from the traditional ‘intuitive semantic’ approach, I provided evidence that Thematic roles are indispensable components of image schemas, and constitute a scaffolding for language structures (2022, forthcoming). A natural question arose then, where they come from in the image schemas. Fillmore (1968) proposed that they may be, “presumably, innate concepts”, while Langacker (1991) alluded to their “nonlinguistic” origin. The present paper argues that Thematic roles come from “nonlinguistic” sources, i.e., human interpretation and categorization of reality, completing the Thematic roles embodiment process.

Some Remarks Regarding the Phraseological Inventory from Ispirescu and Creangă’s Fairy Tales

Author(s): Elvira Buzoianu-Ambrinoc / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

In this article, I aim at characterizing the phraseological inventory both of Petre Ispirescu and of Ion Creangă, as it is used in their fairy tales and illustrating certain functions. At first sight, the amount of set phrases or idioms encountered in Creangă’s texts might seem superior to that of Ispirescu’s. This impression can be caused by Creangă’s richness of expressive procedures compared to Ispirescu’s linguistic possibilities. As I tried to prove, both writers possess, actually, almost the same phraseological inventory. In this regard, I chose to compare some fairy tales, published by Ispirescu and Creangă, fairy tales which have a similar plot and many common features in their structure and content.

Dynamic Substitutes. A Semiotic Perspective

Author(s): Cristinel Munteanu / Language(s): English,Romanian Issue: 1/2023

In this article I aim at proving the relevance of a (possibly) new semiotic concept, which Itermed dynamic substitute. In this regard, dynamic substitutes refer to those types of signs that manifest a kind of “dialectic relation” to the “things” they stand for; that is, they mutually influence each other during the transactions they are involved in. Not only words and money (as symbols), but also maps (as icons), constitute excellent examples of dynamic substitutes, as the American philosopher John Dewey suggested.

Понимание незнакомого слова в тексте: различные тактики детей-монолингвов и детей-инофонов

Author(s): G.R. Dobrova,P. M. Trifonova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2024

This article explores various tactics used by children to understand the meaning of unfamiliar words while reading. The study was performed on 24 children aged 8–9 years, including 12 monolinguals and 12 foreign-language speakers. In such a situation, the two primary tactics are relying on either context or the internal forms of words. The results of the experiment show that monolingual children typically focus on context, while children speaking a foreign language depend more on the inner forms of words, which often means giving priority to the second tactic and completely disregarding context, in terms of meaning and grammar. It was also revealed that the reliance on the internal forms of words persists even when all other words in a given context are clear, suggesting that children speaking a foreign language not only face challenges with comprehending certain Russian words but also have the habit of overlooking context in general. It is therefore important to address this tendency and emphasize the need for contextual understanding when working with such children.

Rola słowników opracowanych przez autochtonów w dokumentacji leksyki gwarowej

Author(s): Halina Karaś / Language(s): Polish Issue: 36/2023

The documentation of dialectal vocabulary is an urgent task in view of the rapid disappearance of dialects or their evolution. That is why it is so important to develop dictionaries of dialects that have not been described lexicographically so far. Regional and local dialectal dictionaries, apart from documentation and scientific purposes, also play an important role in the region, in cultural activities undertaken and in maintaining the awareness of regional distinctiveness. They are an important determinant of this regional and local awareness, a sign of emotional ties connecting the inhabitants of a region or one town.A special role in the Polish dialect lexicography is played by autochthonous authors, both linguists, dialectologists and amateurs. It is them, knowing the native dialect and its users well, who can obtain valuable and rare lexical material for scientific research. The article, based on selected examples, discusses the role of dictionaries developed by indigenous peoples, it also indicates the reasons why these dictionaries are so valuable for dialectology.

Double Negation as a Verum Focus Effect in a Negative Concord Language

Author(s): Mihaela Cristescu,Emil Ionescu / Language(s): English Issue: 1 (39)/2024

The paper proposes an answer to the question of how a language of (strict) negative concord may evince double negation reading in negative clauses with N-words. The question is justified, because according to Giannakidou (2006), languages of strict negative concord cannot express double negation.Romanian is a language of strict negative concord and no consensus exists among researchers, as far as the double negation reading of negative clauses with N-words is concerned. For this reason, we designed and conducted an experiment which shows that double negation is an interpretive option in negative clauses with N-words, even if it is not recognised by all the native speakers. Our experiment also reveals that speakers’ interpretive options with respect to this topic are very diverse. In order to account for them, we propose a theory that explains the duality negative concord/double negation. The theory consists of a number of rules which pairs the prosody of the N-words with their meaning and use. The theory relies on two theses: (i) N-words in Romanian are universal quantifiers sensitive to negation and scoping above it; (ii) emphatic accent on N-words in Romanian marks either the wide scope of the N-words with respect to negation, or the speaker’s verum attitude (Höhle 1992) towards the interlocutor’s utterances. In the literature, the verum attitude is called Verum Focus. When emphasis expresses verum focus, it means agreement or disagreement of the speaker with the truth of the utterance held by the interlocutor. Disagreement amounts to rejecting the truth commitment. If the interlocutor’s utterance is negative and contains N-words, rejecting the truth commitment is asserting its opposite. This yields the double negation effect.In the final section we compare our approach to other solutions already proposed in the literature, and prospect the chances of extending it to other negative concord languages.