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The connection of the thesis advocated by Meillet and Gauthiot of the “implosive”, i.e. unreleased, character of final Proto-Indo-European (PIE) obstruents with the structuralist framework of the Prague School opens up the view for our understanding of the phonological structure of the obstruent or plosive system of PIE and several ancient daughter languages, because based on Trubetzkoy’s theory of neutralization and the archiphoneme the relevant correlation marks can be set up by determining the phonemic status of “implosives”, i.e. unreleased stops, in positions of neutralization. We can conclude that in word final position PIE displayed unreleased lenes (with the phonetic features [–tense, –voiced, –aspirated]), which due to the distinctive function of tenseness (and not voice) were phonologically classified as mediae (with the phonological features [–tense, –aspirated]) and not as tenues (with the phonological features [+tense, –aspirated]). This state of affairs is still reflected directly by the not closely related Indo-European (IE) languages Latin, Avestan and Lydian, and indirectly or less clearly by Hittite, Vedic, Greek, and rudimentarily by Old Persian, Celtic, Slavonic, and possibly by Germanic.
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The topic of this paper, as its title suggests, is the fate of the original Indo-European (IE) aspirates in Balto-Slavic, or possibly in its direct precursor, Proto-Balto-Slavic. In contrast with the Indo-European protolanguage, which is generally reconstructed with three modal classes of stops, both the Baltic and the Slavic languages are modeled on the opposition based on the feature /±voice/ only, with the opposition based on the feature /±aspiration/ not directly attested. Due to this distinction between IE and Balto-Slavic, it is assumed that the original opposition of aspiration was lost at some point during the Proto-Balto-Slavic period. The mechanism of this loss and the question of ‘voiceless aspirates’ are discussed as well. In the paper it is demonstrated that there is no reason to believe that ‘voiceless aspirates’ and ‘voiced aspirates’ ever formed a category of ‘aspirates’, proportional to the opposition between ‘voiceless unaspirates’ and ‘voiced unaspirates’, or to assume that both ‘aspirates’ ever existed at the same moment.
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For about 100 years, a myth has been fostered in Germanic historical linguistics: it has been claimed that some 30% or more of the Germanic lexical stock are of non-Indo-European substrate origin. Despite this claim, no list of more than 40–50 lexical items has ever been offered to prove it. For most of these lexical items, which pertain to the sphere of seafaring and related subjects, solid Indo-European etymologies have been completed in the meantime. On the other hand, it can be shown that the mythical number of 30% is based on an Indo-Europeanists’ incorrect interpretation of rather sound statistics on the Germanic lexicon offered in a book by Bruno Liebich (1899). Moreover, Vennemann’s theories of a ‘Vasconic’ substratum and a ‘Semitidic’ superstratum in the Germanic lexicon may be discarded of as an unproven and unprovable phantasma. Discussion must go on, however, about claims made by Leiden Indo-Europeanists regarding the substratal origin of certain phonological structures in Germanic words, which cannot go back directly to PIE preforms. In the end, the more conservative approaches to the problem by the authors of the Etymological Dictionary of Old High German are exemplified with data taken from Vol. V (2014).
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The goal of this contribution is to show to what extent (if at all) the inventory of lexical means used for expressing contemporary greetings is a reflection of ancient formulas found in texts of the old IE languages, and what the meaning of greetings was in the past. It is generally assumed that the symbolism of greetings stems from the superstitious fear of the absolute dependence on supernatural phenomena, on gods having unlimited power over humans. This principle of subordination of the weak to the strong, in fact, has held true since Antiquity, throughout the Middle Ages, and up to the present day (today this principle is hidden in the rules of etiquette); the only thing that has changed is the model of the strong and the weak, reflecting changes in society. The paper also devotes attention to the origin and motivation of the oldest greeting formulas found both in Greek and Latin texts and in the Old and the New Testament. They are placed into wider lexical-semantic relationships, and their equivalents or continuations are sought in contemporary languages.
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Although suppletion has attracted increasing attention in recent years, there is still no accepted dividing line between suppletion and other types of morphological irregularity. It is argued that even explicitly ahistorical treatments have been biased by diachrony, so that forms which are known to have developed from regular paradigms, e.g. Ancient Greek heîs ‘one’ ~ fem. mía or English think ~ thought, tend to be treated as less “truly” suppletive than those which have no known common source. Such cases are not only to be classified as suppletive on formal grounds, but deserve closer attention than they have heretofore received from historical linguists. Given the widespread view that morphological analogy acts to regularize paradigms which have become opaque as a result of phonological changes, suppletion of this sort may be viewed as the logical end point of sound change acting over significant time depths. Any diachronic typology of suppletion must therefore distinguish between paradigms composed of historically unrelated stems, and those whose stems have diverged through the cumulative effects of phonological change. With their long written records, Indo-European languages furnish numerous examples of the latter type.
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The purpose of this article is to re-ignite a discussion concerning the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European consonant system. The article begins with a discussion of the traditional reconstruction, starting with August Schleicher (1861), continuing on with Karl Brugmann (1904), and ending with current views, as exemplified in the work of James Clackson (2007), Benjamin Fortson (2010), Calvert Watkins (1998), and Winfred P. Lehmann (1952). It then discusses a number of well-known problem areas with the traditional reconstruction and suggests that a better reconstruction is the Glottalic Model of Proto-Indo-European consonantism originally proposed by Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and Vjačeslav V. Ivanov (1972 and 1973), on the one hand, and Paul J. Hopper (1973), on the other. Next, several criticisms of the Glottalic Model are discussed and fully refuted. The article ends with trajectories of the revised Proto-Indo-European consonant system in the principal Indo-European daughter languages. In sum, the traditional reconstruction needs to be abandoned in favor of the Glottalic Model.
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The paper presents a brief assessment of “Nostratic” – the controversial, but promising hypothesis on deeper linguistic connections of the Indo-European family, as envisaged by Vladislav Illich-Svitych and his contemporaries (particularly Aharon Dolgopolsky). We discuss some of the most important developments of the theory since the 1960s, and explain how emphasis on “quantity over quality” of data in the new huge corpora of “Nostratic” comparanda is less useful for advancing the hypothesis than a narrowly targeted emphasis on identifying the “core” evidence for the macrofamily. Identifying this “core” evidence, consisting of a small, but generally stable layer of the basic lexicon, is necessary to lend a more historically realistic flavor to the hypothesis, and its statistical evaluation will also help better understand the place of Indo-European among the other potential constituents of “Nostratic”. We argue that, in weighing the evidence, typological plausibility of semantic shifts and absence of topologic conflicts in the tree are no less important than regularity of sound changes. We also show how the credibility level of various theories on the external connections of Indo-European can be arranged along a gradient – from “Indo-Uralic” to a general “Nostratic”, and indicate implications that such an arrangement may hold for future studies.
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This paper reexamines the core issues of the Indo-European syntax in a typological perspective including the interface of syntax, morphology and pragmatics (and in some instances also prosody). Word order is shown to have been significantly influenced by pragmatic functions even in allegedly prototypical verb-final systems in Anatolian, Indo-Aryan, Germanic and Romance. The paper also discusses the influence of verb valency involving clitic objects on attracting the verb to the initial position in Hellenistic Greek and Old Irish. Another major topic is the development of aspect systems that also had syntactic and pragmatic consequences. The paper discusses the main lines of this development including valency changes in a number of European language groups, whereas Indo-Aryan and Armenian (and to a limited extent also Germanic) primarily introduced other valency-changing categories, particularly causatives. The paper shows that the original typologicalproperties are relatively resistant to change, but areal contacts can play a mediating role as illustrated by Dravidian and Uralic.
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This paper presents a comparison of the largest contemporary corpus of spoken Czech ORAL2013 and a different source, data gathered in the project “Sociolinguistic Analysis of the Use of Prothetic v- in Bohemia” (SAUP). Both of these data sources consist of informal interviews with Czech speakers, but their design is different. ORAL2013 is based on shorter recordings of many speakers whereas the SAUP data is based on longer recordings of fewer speakers. It is assumed that these two data sources should yield similar results since they aim to represent the same population. The comparison is based on the use of two features of spoken Czech in the Bohemia region: prothetic v- and conditional verb forms bych/bysem and bychom/bysme. Based on the analysis, it is concluded that (1) more information about the speakers should be added to future corpora like ORAL2013; (2) the corpus ORAL2013 is useful to conduct a sociolinguistic pilot study which then should be followed by a full-scale research project based on a different sample constructed strictly for the purposes of the particular research; (3) the ratio between the number of speakers in the corpus and the amount of their speech is an important (and often underestimated) aspect of corpus design which should be given careful consideration.
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Jana Kusová: Morphologische Varianz der peripheren Substantivparadigmen im geschriebenen Gegenwartsdeutsch: schwache Maskulina, starke Feminina und gemischte Substantive. Wien: Praesens, 2014. 200 Seiten.
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This text reports on an up-to-date approach to style presented in a new handbook of Czech stylistics (Hoffmannová, Homoláč, Chvalovská, Jílková, Kaderka, Mareš & Mrázková 2016). It describes the handbook’s sound and inspiring take on language and the situations, styles, texts and genres of contemporary communication (uncommonly based on the notion of communicative sphere rather than on the traditional concept of functional style). It evaluates the new perspectives on the description, analysis and interpretation of style in seven selected communicative spheres: everyday communication (both spoken and written), administrative communication, expert communication, school communication, media communication (both spoken and written), advertising communication, and literary communication. The text acknowledges how the employment of the ‘communicative sphere’ notion, together with a predominant focus on orality, shifts the Czech view of style from the traditional functional stylistics approach to the “new” stylistics accenting dialogue, interaction, colloquiality and intertextuality.
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Martin Haspelmath & Andrea D. Sims: O čem je morfologie. Transl. by Aleš Klégr & Kateřina Vašků. Praha: Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Nakladatelství Karolinum, 2015. 376 pp.
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Šárka Zikánová, Eva Hajičová, Barbora Hladká, Pavlína Jínová, Jiří Mírovský, Anna Nedoluzhko, Lucie Poláková, Kateřina Rysová, Magdaléna Rysová & Jan Václ: Discourse and Coherence: From the Sentence Structure to Textual Relations. Prague: Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, 2015. x+266 pp.
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This text is a report on the 5th World Conference on Pluricentric Languages and their Non-Dominant Varieties, which took place in Mainz, Germany in July 2017.
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This paper analyzes one type of valency structure difference in a bilingual, Czech-English valency lexicon and a parallel syntactically annotated treebank, namely the instances of instrument subject alternation, abstract cause subject alternation and locatum subject alternation (Levin 1993), roughly corresponding to three specific verb semantic classes. These alternations represent a problematic point of mutual alignment of valency structures in a parallel corpus and a bilingual valency lexicon because of the dual possible assignment of a semantic role to the position of a syntactic subject, and consequently, the dual interpretation of the deep-syntactic role of an actor. As a result, two different interpretations arise, an agentive one and a non-agentive one, which collide in the syntactically annotated data. The conflict of the two interpretations substantially influences the semantic interpretation of the “target of evaluation” in constructions involving evaluative verbs in sentiment analysis tasks. We discuss the problem through linking individual syntactic, semantic and situational participants, focusing both on the similarities and differences between the three alternation types in question, providing analogies to other known constructions, and studying them from the morphosyntactic, semantic and propositional content points of view.
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František Čermák, Jan Holub (eds.): Slovník české frazeologie a idiomatiky, 5: Onomaziologický slovník. Praha: Leda, 2016. 527 pp.
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