"La Langue de Bois" et "Le Politiquement Correct" dans le Discours Public Roumain

Author(s): Sorina Serbanescu / Language(s): French / Issue: 16/2017

Le discours public roumain d’après la Révolution de '89 a gardé des anciennes habitudes langagières communistes dont "la langue de bois". D’autre côté, il a emprunté, comme une conséquence de la synchronisation trop rapide à la modernité, des clichés langagiers qui continuent les tendances agressives et autoritaires héritées du totalitarisme communiste. Notre analyse imbrique la sémantique du discours, la sémiotique, la pragmatique linguistique et la psycholinguistique, se concentrant sur des corpus tirés des discours publics des dernières dix années.

(Ne)episteminis modalumas: anglų kalbos must, have to ir have got to bei jų vertimo atitikmenys lietuvių kalboje

Author(s): Audrone Šoliene / Language(s): Lithuanian / Issue: 69/2016

This paper deals with the three types of modality – epistemic, deontic and dynamic. It examines the relation between the synchronic uses of the modal auxiliary must and the semi-modals have to and have got to as well as their Lithuanian translation correspondences (TCs) found in a bidirectional translation corpus. The study exploits quantitative and qualitative methods of research. The purpose is to find out which type of modality is most common in the use of must, have to and have got to; to establish their equivalents in Lithuanian in terms of congruent or non-congruent correspondence (Johansson 2007); and to determine how Lithuanian TCs (verbs or adverbials) correlate with different types of modality expressed. The analysis has shown that must is mostly used to convey epistemic nuances, while have to and have got to feature in non-epistemic environments. The findings show that must can boast of a great diversity of TCs. Some of them may serve as epistemic markers; others appear in deontic domains only. Have (got) to, on the other hand, is usually rendered by the modal verbs reikėti ‘need’ and turėti ‘must/have to’, which usually encode deontic modality.

(Nie)poprawność językowa w oświeceniowych gramatykach języka polskiego

Author(s): Wanda Decyk-Zieba,Monika Kresa / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 02/2017

The object of the analysis is forms considered incorrect, non-standard, yet included and discussed in Enlightenment grammar books of Polish by: Walenty zylarski (1770), Michał Dudziński (1776), and Onufry Kopczyński (1778––1781, 1817), and in a book on the Polish language by Stanisław Kleczewski (1767). The issues of proper language use touched upon by the authors in the above mentioned works refer to various problems: spelling, pronunciation, inflection, word structures and appropriateness, syntactic connectivity, and utterance/statement clarity. The object of the evaluation is (general Polish and regional – borderland) forms which, in the authors’ opinion, violated the norms of general familiarity, semantic expressiveness, and stylistic dignity. The grammarians approve of the borrowings which entered the Polish language long ago. Each of the discussed works is another link in the debate on the Polish language, linguistic habit, and norms of language use.

19. Yüzyil Türkistan Şair Ve Tarihçilerinden Mûnis Harezmî (1778-1829) Ve Eseri: Firdevsü’l-İkbâl

Author(s): Hayrullah Kahya / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 77/2014

Knowledge about the 19th century Central Asia Turkish language is quite insufficient. Moreover, an entire list of the artists of this period are not available as related information and documents for this period existed for many years under the domination of the Soviet Russia, a case which made it impossible to reach these documents for many years. However, knowledge about this period has increased thanks to new researches and publications. Certainly Munis Khwarazmi is one of the most important Turkestan artists in 19th century. In this paper, Mûnis Khwarazmi who earned reputation for not only being historian but also poet has been researched together with his important work Firdaws al-iqbal in which he wrote the official history of Khanate of Khiva. Initially, a short information is given about the khanates period of Turkestan (Khiva, Bukhara, Kokand Khanates) and then the life of Mûnis and his works are discussed. Following this, the most important work of Mûnis, Firdaws al-iqbal, has been examined. Phonetic and morphological properties of the work, written by Munis himself, have been examined in respect to its differing properties from Classical Chagatai Turkish until the fifth part of the work. Language style of Mûnis has been studied to be determined with the sample texts taken from the Firdaws al-iqbal.

21-oji tarptautinė specialiosios kalbos konferencija „Tarpdalykinių žinių kūrimas: specialiosios kalbos tyrimų iššūkiai“

Author(s): Asta Mitkeviciene / Language(s): Lithuanian / Issue: 24/2017

7. Sınıf İngilizce Ders Kitaplarında Cinsiyet Kavramı

Author(s): Hatice Çubukçu,Pinar Sivasligil / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 137/2007

This study aims to investigate ELT textbooks from the perspective of gender ideology underlying the representations of female and male figures, considering that coursebooks play an important role in children’s development of ‘gender’. The 7th grade English coursebook published by the Turkish Ministry of Education has been selected as the object of investigation, mainly because they are used by a large population at state schools. Both verbal and non verbal features of the textbooks have been analyzed through the content analysis, and discourse analysis has been applied to the verbal components to depict any possible power assymmetries reflected through language between two genders.

A corpus-driven analysis of structural types of lexical bundles in court judgments in English and their translation into Lithuanian

Author(s): Donata Berukštiene / Language(s): English / Issue: 70/2017

Formulaicity is one of the characteristic features of legal discourse, which manifests itself not only at the level of wording, “but also in the content, structure and layout” of legal texts (Ruusila & Londroos 2016, 123). Formulaic language, which includes phrasal and prepositional verbs, idioms, collocations, lexico-grammatical associations, lexical bundles, etc., are building blocks of legal discourse shaping legal text meanings. However, up to now, far too little attention has been paid to the nature of frequently occurring “sequences of three or more words that show a statistical tendency to co-occur” (Biber & Conrad 1999, 183), i.e. lexical bundles, in different genres of legal texts. Most studies in the field of lexical bundles in legal texts have only been based on one language (e.g. Jablonkai 2009; Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011; Breeze 2013), whereas translation-oriented contrastive studies on lexical bundles are lacking. In respect of the aforementioned gaps, the aim of this pilot study is to analyse structural types of lexical bundles in court judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union in English and to examine the way these structures are rendered into Lithuanian. To gain insights into the frequency and structure of lexical bundles, the present study uses the methodological guidelines of corpus linguistics. The classification of lexical bundles into structural types is based on the framework suggested by Biber et al. (1999, 2004). For the purpose of this study, a parallel corpus of court judgments was compiled comprising approximately 1 million words of original court judgments in the English language and about 8 hundred thousand words of court judgments translated into Lithuanian. Lexical bundles in this research were identified using the corpus analysis toolkit AntConc 3.4.4 (Anthony 2015). A concordance program AntPConc 1.2.0 (Anthony 2017) was employed to find Lithuanian equivalents of the most frequent lexical bundles identified in the English court judgments. The evidence from this study suggests that different structural types of lexical bundles have more or less regular equivalents in Lithuanian; however, in most cases, these equivalents tend to be shorter.

A diminished propensity to compute scalar implicatures is linked to autistic traits

Author(s): Greta Mazzaggio,Luca Surian / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2018

We investigated whether there is an association between autistic traits in the broader phenotype and the ability to compute scalar implicatures. Previous studies found that the frequency of autistic traits is higher in students of science than of humanities. Here we recorded the frequency of rejection of underinformative scalar items in students enrolled either in a science or in a humanities curriculum and assessed their autistic traits using the Autism-Spectrum Quotient questionnaire. We found that rejections were less frequent in science curricula students than in humanities curricula students. Moreover, rejections were associated negatively with autistic traits and positively with performance on Theory-of-Mind tasks. These findings suggest that autism cognitive phenotype is negatively associated with a propensity to spontaneously derive scalar implicatures

A discourse approach to conceptual metaphors: a corpus-based analysis of sports discourse in croatian

Author(s): Daniela Katunar,Ida Raffaelli / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2016

This paper deals with the analysis of sports discourse in Croatian through the theoretical framework offered by conceptual metaphor theory. Within this framework, certain metaphorical expressions found in sports discourse are analyzed as expressions of two conceptual metaphors: sport is war and sport is force. The analysis of these metaphorical expressions combines the methodology of cognitive linguistics with corpus linguistics, resulting in the proposal of a new method for discourse analysis in general. In our research, we introduce the notion of the specialized digitized corpus as a basis for further quantitative and qualitative research. On the basis of the specialized digitized corpus created for the purposes of this research, it is shown how the formation of sports discourse is dependent on three categories of metaphorical expressions relative to the degree of their conventionalization within sports discourse: (a) conventionalized, (b) semi-conventionalized, and (c) innovative metaphorical expressions. Each of these categories is analyzed according to their frequency and various aspects of meaning that it entails. Through the introduction of the semi-conventionalized metaphorical expression category, we aim to examine the gradable line between language creativity and conventionality as it is formed within the discourse of sports.

A Feature Geometric Approach of Verbal Inflection in Onondaga

Author(s): Gabriela Alboiu,Michael Barrie / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2015

Iroquoian inflectional verbal morphology is well-documented in the descriptive literature (Chafe 1961, Lounsbury 1949, 1953, Michelson and Doxtator 2002), but has received less attention from a generative perspective. Most generative analyses of verbal inflection rely on the notion of tense as a central category and the universal projection of a Tense Phrase. Onondaga (Northern Iroquoian), however, often makes very little use of tense as a grammatical concept, capitalizing instead on the notions of aspect and mood, thereby rendering the standard generative approach inappropriate. Instead, we propose that a feature geometric analysis (Cowper 2005), which does not rely on tense as a central concept, is better suited for analyzing the Onondaga verbal inflectional domain.

A Few Words about the Aphorism Factory

Author(s): Zsolt Farkas / Language(s): English / Issue: 04/1994

It all started in a Schwäbisch Hall bookstore in the autumn of 1986. As I dawdled, drooling, and fondled the amazing selection, a quotation on the back of a book by someone called Hermann Lang caught my eye: “Das Unbewußte ist die Rede des Anderen”: “The unconscious is the discourse of the other”. Work is proceeding on the 2.0 version of the Aphorism Factory: it will allow the user to choose from a wide range of dictionaries and grammatical structures. (There are some fascinating possibilities. For instance, “Even an x is only a y ” or “You’ll never make an x of a y ”. And there are structures like: “An x is like a y: it’s a and 6, where a and b are adjectives. There are some marvelous adjectives. Or a format like “X is z;-ing y ’, where v is a third person singular, transitive verb: e.g., destroy, violate, deconstruct, and snicker at, etc.

A general theory of jokes whose butts are the stupid and the canny

Author(s): Christie Davies / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2009

Jokes about stupidity are extremely common in most countries, as ethnic, national, regional and locality jokes, political jokes, jokes about occupations and social classes, and blonde and Essex-girl jokes. The aim of this paper is to provide a theory that will explain why such diverse groups of people should be the butts of what is essentially the same joke. It will also explain jokes that are the opposite of the stupidity jokes, the widespread jokes about the canny (clever, crafty, calculating, stingy), whether jokes about ethnic groups, regional groups, townspeople or occupations. The key explanatory variables are first, the dominance of centre over periphery whether defined in geographical, cultural, language or social class terms and second, among the powerful, the contrast between those who hold arbitrary monopoly power based on control of the state and the means of force and those who have achieved their position through legitimate competition.

A SEMANTIC-COGNITIVE ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPT OF UKRAINE IN THE SPEECHES OF B. OBAMA (2014)

Author(s): Anatoliy Khudoliy / Language(s): English / Issue: 16/2016

This article presents a semantic-cognitive analysis of the concept of Ukraine, verbally represented in the speeches of the American President, Barak Obama. The peculiarities of the President’s worldview are highlighted. The objective of the article is as follows. Firstly, it aims to demonstrate that the concept of Ukraine is verbally represented in the speeches of Obama. This means that Ukraine as a country, moving towards democracy despite the war with Russia, is an object of focus for American leaders. Secondly, the article suggests that there is a connection between the concept described, its pragmatic orientation and its cognitive processes. Thirdly, it describes the semantic peculiarities of the concept of Ukraine in the political speeches of the American leader, which are due to the role Ukraine plays in the local and regional context. Our research is based on the content-analysis of political speeches delivered by American President. The functional, communicative and pragmatic orientation of the speeches is highlighted. In line with the approaches of cognitive scholars, the article concludes that the concept of Ukraine is a complex semantic-cognitive structure that consists of core, transition zone and periphery. During the research for this article, fifteen speeches made by Obama in 2014 were analysed. This research presupposes the application of content analysis. It is relevant in the analysis of international relations with respect to the notions used by President Obama in his speeches delivered during 2014 in the relations between: the USA – Ukraine, Ukraine – Russia, the USA – Russia, and Europe – Ukraine.

A sociolinguistic investigation of Arabic ‘professional reputation’

Author(s): Ahmad Khalaf Sakarna / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2013

The current work attempts to investigate the vital role of linguistics in saving and defending ‘reputation’ as an important social and cultural phenomenon that is widely known in Jordan as al-isim ‘the name’ or al-sum‘a ‘the reputation’. A good example that illustrates the common application of this social phenomenon in the Arabic culture is an ordinary job known as samsara, i.e., the act of marketing a property, which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been studied in the linguistic literature. The study attempts to shed lights on the different linguistic features associated with the struggle to save ‘reputation’ within the field of samsara. It argues that it is a big challenge for alsimsār, ‘the dealer’, to resist losing ‘reputation’, as maintaining it requires mastering the skill of using certain linguistic strategies and structures, which I call linguistic power, to maintain al-isim or al-sum‘a as an important social and cultural value. It is an interesting case where three different fields (business, linguistics, and sociology) interact in which business appeals to using linguistic and social tools to survive socially and professionally.

Abraham Kajzer i jego tekst z obozów koncentracyjnych – studium przypadku

Author(s): Barbara Elmanowska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 1/2015

The author analyses one of the intimate diaries from concentration camps written by AbrahamKajzer, who was a prisoner of KL Auschwitz-Birkenau and AL Riese (which was a part of KL Gross-Rosen on Lower Silesia). In article is uses Paweł Rodak’s theory of broad understanding of diary’s materiality as a writing practice, which was very complicated and difficult during the World WarII, especially at concentrations camps (finding material and tool to write, organizing space andwork out a ritual of writing; also place where notes were hiding and their fates in the post-war years). Diary it’s not only on textual level but it’s closely related to regular life. But in the campwriting daries was extremely dangerous practice (author could pay with his own life for it). Abraham Kajzer was an writing in Yiddish on empty cement bags with indelible pencil in camplatrine, where he was also hiding notes. After war he passed on his material to Adam Ostoja, who translated them and edited to publication.Kajzer described his reality in concentration camps and many traumatic experiences, which are one of many evidences of the Nazi genocide.

Abstrakt: Čo? Prečo? Ako?

Author(s): Diana Krajnáková / Language(s): Slovak,English / Issue: 23-24/2015

Although the abstract as an academic genre originated in the context of the Anglo-Americanwriting tradition, it has progressively penetrated all academic settings and nowadays is aninherent part of the majority of academic publications. While the official documents reifyingthe standard of academic writing in the setting of Slovak universities provide clearinstructions for writing this particular genre, the Slovak academic community seems to stillunderestimate its significance and usually considers its writing an inescapable evil. Thereforeon the basis of a theoretical-empirical methodological approach, the present article aims tooutline a complex picture of the abstract, including its history, genre analysis, structuraltypology and linguistic features, and further focuses on the most frequent text type of abstract.At this point, the paper describes the individual steps when writing a linear and informativeabstract by way of demonstrating the use of five rhetorical moves, hence motivation, problemstatement, methodology, results and conclusion, and the linguistic preference for the thirdperson singular in connection with active verbs. The comprehensive writing guideline offers ahelping hand not only for students finishing their final theses, but also for other members ofacademia who may make use of these instructions when submitting the linear and informativetype of abstract.

Acquisition of noun derivation in Estonian and Russian L1

Author(s): Reili Argus,Victoria Kazakovskaya / Language(s): English / Issue: 14/2018

Acquisition of derivation is not a well-studied area in first language research and a comparative approach to the acquisition of derivation in different languages doesn’t exist. There is no information on how a child acquires derivation in a language with a rich and regular system of derivational patterns, or in a language where derivation is productive, but the system of derivational patterns is opaque. According to general ideas of complexity in a language, the child should start to use simplex stems first and, only after that, complex ones, that is, complexity should increase in the course of acquisition. Our paper is intended to address these issues, based on longitudinal child data from typologically different languages, Estonian and Russian. The results revealed significant differences in the acquisition of noun derivation in the two languages under observation. The system of noun derivation is acquired at a faster pace in Russian, while Estonian children have far fewer noun derivatives in their speech and they use different derivation suffixes with less regularity. Even so, the so-called building block model may be applied for both languages only partially.

Actualisation du sens des séquences figées en contexte

Author(s): Anna Krzyzanowska / Language(s): French / Issue: 4/2018

The article aims to show the role of the context and the situation of speaking (communication situation) in the process of updating the meaning of phraseological units (fixed expressions). It has been observed that in communication, disambiguation usually takes place by means of context. On the other hand, it turned out that the context itself can be a source of ambiguity. The results obtained in this short study seem to confirm the claim that the update is essentially a modal process, and the semantic coherence results from the interweaving of language, pragmatic, socio-cultural and cognitive constraints.

Adriana Maria Robu, Discursul publicitar din perspectivă pragmalingvistică, Editura Universității „Al. I. Cuza” Iași, 2015, ISBN 978- 606-714-107-8, 532 de pagini.

Author(s): Oana Magdalena Cenac / Language(s): Romanian / Issue: 1-2/2016

Având ca punct de plecare teza de doctorat, susținută la Universitatea „Al. I. Cuza” din Iași, cartea doamnei Adriana Maria Robu exploatează un teren extrem de ofertant – discursul publicitar – care îi permite o abordare din perspective multiple: pragmalingvistică, retorică, stilistică. Plasată în contextul amplu al lucrărilor existente în domeniu, multe dintre ele compilații sau sinteze din diverse lucrări din bibliografia internațională, Discursul publicitar din perspectivă pragmalingvistică se impune, la o primă vedere, printr-o abordare sistematică, bazată pe o documentare foarte bogată și actualizată a domeniului, pornind de la o selecție valorică a tuturor studiilor parcurse și inserate în bibliografie.

Adverbs as evidentials: an English-Spanish contrastive analysis of twelve adverbs in spoken and newspaper discourse

Author(s): Marta Carretero,Juana I. Marín-Arrese,Julia Lavid-López / Language(s): English / Issue: 70/2017

This paper presents a contrastive analysis of six English evidential adverbs ending in -ly with their Spanish nearest translation equivalents, in spoken and newspaper discourse. The adverbs may be associated with varying degrees of reliability: high (clearly/claramente, evidently/evidentemente, obviously/obviamente), medium (apparently/al parecer) and low (seemingly/aparentemente, supposedly/supuestamente). The analysis is based on tokens of authentic language extracted from two contemporary corpora, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA). The qualitative analysis focuses on the evidential functions of the adverbs and on their pragmatic interactional uses; the quantitative analysis centres on the relative frequency of type of evidential functions and the clausal position of the adverbs. The results uncover a number of differences between the English adverbs and their Spanish correlates and also between the two discourse types. Practically all the adverbs are strongly specialized in expressing either indirect-inferential or indirect-reportative evidentiality. English obviously and Spanish evidentemente show a high frequency of cases of loss of evidential meaning due to pragmaticalization, specifically in spoken discourse. Regarding position, the English adverbs are more frequent in medial clausal position, while some Spanish adverbs are often found in the more prominent parenthetical position.