Jazyky a aktéri v jazykovej krajine obcí na slovensko-maďarskom etnicky zmiešanom území na Slovensku

Author(s): Gizella Szabómihály / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2020

The aim of this paper is to characterize the linguistic landscape of municipalities in Slovakia inhabited by Hungarian minority. Empirical data come from two sources: from BA and MA theses, which were defended in 2015 – 2020 at the Institute of Hungarian Linguistics and Literary Studies at the Faculty of Central European Studies, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra and from research project VEGA “Minority variety of the Hungarian language in Slovakia”. As part of the above field research, the linguistic landscape of 82 municipalities in which the Hungarian population makes up at least 20% of the population was mapped. The results fundamentally confirm the research findings of P. Laihonen, who studied linguistic landscape in two municipalities. In all municipalities, the most frequent language was Slovak, this applies to all types of analyzed signs with texts (inscriptions of state and municipal authorities, commercial and private signs). Slovak occurs on at least 80% of signs, the representation of Hungarian as the second most frequent language is between 25 – 55%. The most bilingual Slovak-Hungarian signs are in the southwest of Slovakia, where the largest Hungarian minority lives and where Hungarians form the local majority. On bilingual Slovak-Hungarian signs, the preferred language is Slovak, in terms of information content, it is a duplicate publication of information. Municipal authorities and the commercial sphere have the greatest influence on the formation of the linguistic landscape.

Počítačom podporovaný výskum maďarských nárečí na Slovensku

Author(s): Károly Presinszky / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2020

Computer supported research of Hungarian dialects in Slovakia began in 2010 at the Institute of Hungarian Linguistics and Literary Science, Faculty of Central European Studies, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. The research is carried out using dialectological software developed by two researchers (Domokos Vékás and Fruzsina Sára Vargha) from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, creating regional dialect databases, first for the Žitný ostrov/Csallóköz region and then for the whole Slovakia Hungarian dialect region. Before a detailed presentation of research results and possibilities in the field of digitized dialectological data, the study briefly describes the methods and Hungarian results of digital dialectology. Based on Hungarian research in Slovakia, it shows how it is possible to generate maps showing the geographical and social distribution of linguistic phenomena and acoustic phonetic analyses of data aligned with sound files. Important results of digital dialectology in Nitra are recently published audiobooks of Hungarian dialects in Slovakia, which can be used in addition to the needs of the researchers as a collection of multimedia dialect texts in school education and in the promotion of dialects.

Paradigma maďarských slovies zakončených na morfému -ika jej súčasný stav v systéme slovies a v komunikačnej praxi

Author(s): István Kozmács / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2020

The article deals with the typology of the paradigms of Hungarian verb and describes the phenomenon of the originally medial-reflexive -ik verbs of Hungarian. The article presents the problems caused by the use of the paradigm revived by the Hungarian language renewal in the 19th century and compares the use of the -ik verbs by bilingual Hungarian students in Slovakia with their contemporaries in Hungary. The result of the study shows that Hungarian high school students in Slovakia are more likely to search for standard variants compared to their Hungarian peers if they feel that using a non-standard solution could lead to a negative value judgment.

Egalitná jazyková komunikácia

Author(s): Juraj Dolník / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2022

The pragmatic reason for supporting the promotion of equal language communication is that this communication is part of a social event that aims to develop an inclusive society. However, this support also has an anthropological reason, which is based on the reconstruction of the origin of man as a being of his kind and his humanization. His humanization is based on continuous self-realization and rational social solidarity, consisting in the fact that the actors of social interaction are committed to creating a lively environment for parity self-realization. Such self-realization is governed by the principle of equality differentiation, which includes the contextual neutralization of relevant differences between actors. Transparency is essential for overcoming equality barriers in language communication, but it is important to perceive the opposition between levelling and cultivated equality communication. This contrast draws attention to the idea of optimally transparent language, which leads the actors to set the optimal ratio between transparent and non-transparent forms of expression. Since the humanization of individuals and society corresponds to cultivated equality communication, the order of the day is to increase the volume of language communication in society with such a degree of non-transparency (negativity) that stimulates the interpretive activity of the actors. When examining equal language communication with regard to its impact on the cultural level of society, one of the relevant issues is the adaptation of the relationship between positive and negative transparency to current communication events.

The intensifying function of reduplication in contemporary Polish and Slovak

Author(s): Sylwia Sojda / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

In this paper, I present and discuss the ways of intensifying in Polish and Slovak language communication using reduplication, because one of the semantic properties of reduplication is intensification. Various linguists have pointed out that reduplication may perform many different functions. Reduplication is also associated with a large subset of semantic and syntactic operations, including intensity. Although it is heavily semantically limited to adjectives and adverbs, it applies to nearly all parts of speech. According to its intensifying function, it is common in contemporary Slovak, being mainly associated with compound adjectives, i.e. šírošíry, číročíry, dennodenný. Reduplicative constructions are understood as independent language signs, formally and semantically different from their components. Reduplication means a reinforcement of a statement, so there are various semantic constraints on the reduplicant: it involves only gradable attributes and attributes denoting a higher degree of feature intensity (in plus). The reinforcement does not necessarily mean the increase of intensity of a state - the aim of reduplication is not only to modify but also to specify the meaning. Intensifying reduplication is one of the many ways of expressing the intensive degree or intensity of an action that is something above the assumed norm and it is a legitimate way of expanding the lexis.

Expressing Measure in Czech (A Corpus-based Study)

Author(s): Marie Mikulová / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

In the contribution, we provide a theory-based and corpus-verified description of expressions for measure in Czech. We demonstrate that the measure expressions may modify quantity of entities (approximately ten boys), internal characteristics of events (he works a lot), properties (very big) and relations (completely without sound). We distinguish between the measure expressions that are an answer to the question To what extent? (Extent-modifiers) and expressions that modify an answer to the question How many? (Quantity-modifiers). The Extent-modifiers are formally, structurally and semantically more diverse than the Quantity-modifiers. For the Quantity-modifiers a list of forms and functions is provided. Theoretical knowledge stemming from the analysis will subsequently be used to improve the annotation in the Prague Dependency Treebanks. It can be also useful for other semantically-oriented descriptions of language.

Adverbs Derived from Adjectival Present Participles in Polish, Slovak and Czech: A Comparative Corpus-based Study

Author(s): Aksana Schillová / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

The paper investigates and compares the inventory of adverbs derived from adjectival present participles in the Polish, Slovak and Czech languages. The particularity of these adverbs is that they do not occur in every language, even if it concerns closely related languages. While in Polish and Slovak this type of adverbs is represented by hundreds of lemmas, in Czech it is almost not represented. The comparative analysis is carried out on the data retrieved from the comparable web corpora Aranea. The sets of adverbs extracted from the comparable corpora of the languages examined are analysed by the following criteria: the total number of the adverb lemmas in the corpus, their relative frequency (ipm), morphemic structure features, collocability preferences. The similarities and differences between the adverb sets are established. According to the corpus data, the adverbs derived from adjectival present participles are more widely used in Polish than in Slovak, and in Czech they are a rare phenomenon represented by a limited number of lemmas with a negligible frequency.

The Effect of (Historical) Language Variation on the East Slavic Lects Lemmatisers Performance

Author(s): Ilia Afanasev,Olga Lyashevskaya,Stefan Rebrikov,Yana Shishkina,Igor Trofimov,Natalia Vlasova / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

The need to develop tools for historical and regional variations is becoming more urgent in natural language processing. In this paper, we present two candidate systems for lemmatising historical East Slavic lects (Late Old East Slavic and Middle Russian), as well as modern regional East Slavic lects (Belogornoje and Megra): BERT-based end-to-end pipeline with language-specific heuristics and sequence-to-sequence BART-based encoder-decoder. To evaluate their predictions, we use accuracy score and string similarity measures, such as Levenshtein distance. The BERT-based model is more suitable for the regional data, achieving 85% accuracy score, and only 74% on the historical data. BART-based model climbs up to 92.6% accuracy score on the historical data, yet gets only 80% on the regional data. We provide an error analysis and discuss ways to enhance models, such as dictionary lookup and spellchecker.

Nepriama indexická identifikácia

Author(s): Marián Zouhar / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2023

Indexical expressions are typical linguistic means aimed at identifying objects in the surroundings of communication participants. Sometimes, however, by using them, one can single out objects beyond the boundaries of the communication context. For example, by using the pronoun he supplemented by an act of ostension directed at a work of art, one can identify the author of that artwork, not the work itself. This is a case of an indirect indexical identification, which consists in the fact that the object of ostension is different from the object of identification of the use of the indexical expression. This phenomenon poses a challenge to semantic theories of indexical expressions. Their content must be modeled such that the transition from the object of ostension to the object of identification is captured. The paper proposes an explanation according to which the semantic content of the occurrence of an indexical expression used for indirect identification is descriptive (rather than referential). Specifically, it is a content in which the object of identification is described on the basis of its contextually relevant relationship to the object of ostension, which can also be expressed through a suitable descriptive expression. Such an explanation avoids some of the problems that indexical terms used for indirect identification bring.

Korpus textov rusínskej wikipédie

Author(s): Radovan Garabík / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2024

Porovnanie výkladov teolexikálnych hesiel v Stručnom katolíckom teologickom slovníku a v Slovníku súčasného slovenského jazyka

Author(s): Illya Bey / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2024

Despite the small number of examples examined, at least three factors characterizing the specificity of the reflection of theolexical entries in the SKTS against the background of the SSSJ are evident: 1) the SKTS is "oversaturated" with general information in entries that are only a pretext for the inclusion of this information in the dictionary; 2) despite the fact that it is a terminological dictionary, it lacks some theorems that are in the SSSJ; 3) in SKTS we have also encountered the phenomenon that set expressions with derivatives of the base word are listed, but the base word itself is absent in the dictionary.

Vábenie sirén. Slovosledné riešenia pri preklade z typologicky odlišného jazyka (na príklade románu P. Handkeho Krátky list na dlhú rozlúčku)

Author(s): Martina Ivanová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2024

The paper brings the linguistic analysis of the novel by P. Handke Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied (1972) and its Slovak and Czech translation with a special attention paid to the word order solutions used in both texts. It deals with the issue of the translation from typologically different language, namely German, which employs grammatical principle as a factor determining the word order to larger extent as opposed to Slovak and Czech in which functional sentence perspective plays the central role in the linear placement of the sentence components. The analysis proves that Slovak translation more often adheres to word order patterns of the original text whereas Czech translation applies word order solutions complying with informational and discourse-pragmatic structuring more frequently.

Zemplínske dial. chiňar "človek s príliš nízkou telesnou hmotnosťou; chorý, chudorľavý človek": príspevok k štúdiu inoslovanských súvislostí slovenskej nárečovej lexiky

Author(s): Ľubor Králik / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2024

The article discusses the etymology of Slovak dial. chiňar "a person with too low body weight; frail, sickly person", documented in the Zemplín dialect of Eastern Slovakia (cf. also the surnames Chiňar, Chiňár, Chyňar attested in the Zemplín region). In the author’s opinion, the word may be interpreted etymologically as an original nomen agentis ("a person who leans, bends down, etc.", thence probably "a person with a bent posture" > "infirm, sickly, frail person [with low body weight]") derived from an otherwise unattested Slovak *chýňať (sa) (Zemplín dial. *chiňac (še)) as an imperfective-iterative of Slovak *chynúť (sa), Zemplín dial. *chinuc (še) "to lean, bend" < (Proto-)Slavic *chynǫti (cf. Polish chynąć, Russian dial. xinút‘-sja "to lean, bend"). The present etymological note also illustrates the importance of dialectal lexicon for the research into the autochthonous component in the vocabulary of Slovak which should be studied against a wider Slavic background.

Otváranie nových dimenzií

Author(s): Pavol Žigo / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 4/2024

Reiveiw of: Králik, Ľubor. Dimenzie slovenskej etymológie. First edition. Bratislava: VEDA, vydavateľstvo SAV, 2023. 175 pages. ISBN 978-80-224-2046-4.

Deictic center split in delayed interpretation paradoxes: Solutions inspired by evidence from Polish

Author(s): Teresa Flera / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

This paper presents a nuanced theoretical approach to the semantic interpretation of indexical expressions in delayed interpretation scenarios such as the Answering Machine Paradox [AMP] (Sidelle 1991). In order for recorded messages containing indexicals to be true with respect to the context of interpretation rather than the context of recording, semantic indexical shift must take place (Kaplan 1979). This is something that truth-conditional approaches to indexicality struggle to explain. The solution proposed in this paper is inspired by evidence from the syntax of Polish negated locative statements. The occurrence of the Genitive of Negation in Polish locatives that forces a Nominative-to-Genitive shift on the main noun phrase suggests a cognitive distancing from the object whose presence at a location is denied. The fact that it occurs for sentences containing indexicals could point at a phenomenon that corroborates the need for indexical shift in such cases. The notion of deictic center split is proposed to explain how a reference-based framework can link the empty reference of an indexical at the context of interpretation with the real reference at the context of recording thus saving the intuitions behind the standard account while allowing for semantic indexical shift in AMP cases.

Augmentatywne rzeczowniki i przymiotniki w języku słowackim z perspektywy języka polskiego

Author(s): Mariola Szymczak-Rozlach / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2024

The article concerns Slovak and Polish augmentative derivatives - nouns and adjectives with their word-forming exponents (suffixes and prefixes) and lexical exponents such as adnominals, which specify the meaning of magnitude (augmentative). The author pays attention to the state of research in this area and to the necessity of comparative Slovak-Polish research. The research material has been extracted mainly from Slovak lexicographical sources and the National Corpora of Slovak and Polish languages. The semantic properties of the described units are also the subject of analysis. Moreover, the suffixal and prefixal formants of selected augmentative derivatives are also characterised based on models proposed in the Slovak dictionary of word formation.

Názvy zaniknutých osád v okrese Galanta

Author(s): Patrik Jakubek / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 5/2024

Settlement names (oikonyms) can give a very rich testimony about the life of our ancestors or about various inter-lingual interactions. However, many named settlements have disappeared in the past for various reasons and their names have gradually fallen into oblivion. In this paper, we therefore focus on the names of now extinct localities that were located within the cadastral boundaries of todayʼs bilingual Galanta district. The main aim is to clarify their onymic motivation on the basis of their etymological backround.

Pytačky: Tradičná oslava záväzku (a) rodiny

Author(s): Martina Kotvanová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 6/2024

In traditional Slovak communities, weddings were not just family events but also significant social gatherings that strengthened community bonds. The process leading to marriage involved several stages, including courtship, engagement, and various pre-wedding rituals. Unlike modern romantic relationships, these stages had practical and socio-economic dimensions. Customs such as "nahováračky" (courtship) and "pytačky" (formal request for marriage) were deeply rooted in cultural norms and varied across regions. The article delves into the unique lexicon and practices associated with these traditions, highlighting their ceremonial nature and regional differences. It also explores the roles of intermediaries like matchmakers and the importance of family approval in the marriage process. The preservation of these customs through repeated practice over the years offers a glimpse into the cultural and linguistic richness of Slovak heritage.

Na tropach słowiańskich dialektyzmów leksykalnych w toponimii Polski: *vertěja 'wzniesienie' i pokrewne

Author(s): Zbigniew Babik / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2024

A Polish field name attested in the 20th–21th centuries as Wrzyciej, Wrzycieja and (plural?) Wrzycieje (the village of Apolonka, Silesian Voivodeship, Southern Poland) seems to reflect the ancient Slavic lexical dialectism *vertěja 'small hill; holm (?)', conserved as appellative up to our days mainly in Old and North Russian as well as in few Belarusian and peripheric North-Western Ukrainian dialects. In the main bulk of the paper historical reflexes of this word (including variants) and those of the most closely related lexemes *vertь (*-i-stem) and *vertьje are presented and discussed. The latter, in their turn, may be reflected in the Polish place names Wrzec(z)ko bis (if < *Vert-ьsko) and (so?) Wrzecica (if < *Vertica). As the vowel y of Wrzyciej- might point to the retained length of the etymologically long radical syllable, some remarks are devoted to the prosodic reconstruction and subsequent evolution of possible proto-forms as well.

Slovenski narečni hapaks legomenon mežek 'mlad medved' in slovansko *mečьkъ 'medved'

Author(s): Metka Furlan / Language(s): Slovenian Issue: 2/2024

In the paper, the Slovenian dialect hapax legomenon məžək 'young bear', which was only attested in a narrow area of the Gorenjsko dialect, is related and explained from South-Slavic *mečьkъ 'bear' (= Serbian dial. méːčak, Macedonian dial. mečòk). The regularly expected phonetic development from *mečьkъ would be reflected as Slovenian *mečək, therefore, the Gorenjsko məžək belongs to those lexemes which have undergone non-systematic and sporadic phonetic changes. In the paper, it was not possible to give an unequivocal answer to the question of the etymology of the word family *mečьkъ : *mèčьka : *mečьcь with the starting point in the noun *mèka f 'bear', because *mèka could be a hypocoristic for *meduedь 'bear' or a deverbative from *me-ka-ti of onomatopoeic origin.