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The article draws attention to two lesser known lines written in Glagolitic which are part of the Epilogue to Pamvo Berynda’s Triod Cvetnaja, printed in Kiev in 1631. Thanks to their typographic realisation, these two lines seem to have been mainly considered „an ornament“ or a „cryptographic“ element of the text in older literature. The article presents the Glagolitic text in standard Unicode encoding, so it becomes electronically searchable as such, along with a transliteration and a translation. It turns out that the Glagolitic text is nearly identical to the self-descriptions famout printer Pamvo Berynda had used before (although in Cyrillic). Another question put forth in the paper is the provenience of the actual printing types used in Kiev in 1631. A comparision shows that the letters look similar – but not identical – to printing type used around the same time Italy (Rome, Venice) or by Primož Trubar in the century before. The typographic quality of the Kievan types is, however, inferior.
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The review of: "Girl spins, Lord of the thread gives." About the coherence of the folk vision of the world by A. Gołębiowska-Suchorska; Bydgoszcz 2011, 256 pp.
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The paper submits the findings of the research which explored the acoustic properties of highly competent Serbian L2 speakers’ vowels and the vowels produced by American native speakers in two reading tasks. The study involved four participants: two female native speakers of English and two highly proficient female Serbian speakers of English. The participants were instructed to read a dialogue and a story, after which the duration and the quality of the vowels produced were measured. Based on the analysis of the collected data, the results showed that there were differences in the production of vowels between the two groups of speakers, but it was concluded that, despite these differences, the Serbian participants did not have any major issues with the production of vowels that would significantly, or at all, afflict their intelligibility. Neither the vowel quality nor the vowel duration was critical for the Serbian participants compared to that of the American speakers. What the research instead inferred was that the American participants displayed a strong tendency to reduce their vowels, while the Serbian participants did not reveal such a marked tendency to do the same.
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The development of the lexicon and conceptual system of Estonian has been influenced by the translation of Bible into Estonian. In order to achieve a more precise translation, new words were created either by means of borrowings or derivation using extant word stems. One of the central concepts in Christianity is agape (love), which was translated in early Estonian texts mostly by the word ‘arm’, which was a word with a rather broad meaning. During the Bible translation in the beginning of the 18th century, a new term ‘armastus’ was derived from the same-stem verb ‘armastama’, as an exact counterpart for Greek agape. In the later development of Estonian, the meaning of this term expanded. In the article, the development of Estonian counterparts of agape and the closely related concepts charis and eleos are examined with the comparisons of Latin and German terms, which were languages also used in Estonia during the missionary work and Bible translation.
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The conducted analysis of dual aspect verbs (based on selected linguistic material) and contrasting them with the state observed a quarter or half century ago do not show interdependencies between the existence of the group of genetically foreign dual aspect verbs – which are very limited and virtually relic in Polish but definitely more frequent in Slovakian – and a strong trend for word borrowing. On the contrary, the observed linguistic increase in prefixed oppositional units of perfective aspect indicates that more significant impact on their development and functioning is exerted by the established word formation technique as well as the lexical and grammatical structure of the native language.
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The present paper deals with the verbs gauti ‘get’ and tekti ‘be gotten’ as a means of acquisitive modality in the 16th–17th century texts of Old Lithuanian. The realizations of acquisitive modality in Old Lithuanian have not been examined yet. Thus, the aim of the paper is to explore the use of the verbs gauti ‘get’ and tekti ‘be gotten’ in the selected Old Lithuanian texts and to discuss the potential direction of the development of their modal meanings. The study of the Old Lithuanian writings shows that both verbs gauti ‘get’ and tekti ‘be gotten’ are most frequently used as non-modal verbs in Old Lithuanian. The verb gauti ‘get’ typically comes in personal constructions, while the verb tekti ‘be gotten’ appears in impersonal as well as personal constructions. The Lithuanian verbs under consideration denote acquisition in the constructional patterns with NP as their grammatical object. However, the thorough analysis of the verbs in the selected texts also reveals evidence of their modal use. The modal meanings of the verbs under study are prominent in constructions with an infinitival complement. Both acquisitive verbs allow modal readings with transitive as well as intransitive verb complements. Gauti ‘get’ functions as a modal verb more frequently than tekti ‘be gotten’. The few modal instances of the latter have been found only in non-original texts. Moreover, the verb tekti ‘be gotten’ can express participant-external modality only (possibility or necessity). However, since the examples of modal tekti ‘be gotten’ come from the translations from Polish, the influence of the source language should not be overlooked. In contrast, the verb gauti ‘get’ functions as a modal verb in both original and non-original Lithuanian texts, and it expresses actualized possibility, participant-internal and participant-external possibility. It was noticed that the participant-external use is more frequent than the participant-internal one. Since in Contemporary Lithuanian gauti ‘get’ is specialized for expressing participant-external modality, we may assume that participant-internal possibility might have disappeared over time. It is also worth to note that in the texts under analysis gauti ‘get’ does not display the modal meaning of necessity, which is a frequent use of the verb in Contemporary Lithuanian. Thus, its meaning of modal necessity may have developed later than the meaning of possibility. Moreover, it has been observed that gauti ‘get’ typically occurs as a modal verb in the texts published in Minor Lithuania.
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The article presents alternative etymologies for the Estonian words koost ‘(wooden) spoon’ and kaugas ‘men’s shirt breast with a double waist, used as a pocket; wallet’ and the Northern Finnic word represented by Finnish kaukalo ‘trough’. The word koost is found primarily on the western Estonian islands. Julius Mägiste has proposed a Russian etymology for it, as a borrowing based on *kopusta ‘mixing tool’. Mägiste’s Russian etymology presumes the phonological development chain *kopusta > *koβusta > *kovosta > koost, proposed specifically for this case, which is implausible. Koost is most likely of Baltic origin, from a loan base the successors of which are lithuanian kaũstė / kaustė̃ ‘vessel hollowed out from a tree trunk, drinking horn’, latvian kaũšķins ‘ladle’ etc. Upon its borrowing, the Baltic au was replaced by ou, which later developed into a long ō. this kind of substitution and phonological development is characteristic of livonian, where vowels are in quantitative and mostly also qualitative paradigmatic alternation, including ou : ō. The borrowing has presumably come to Estonian via Livonian, where it is no (longer) recorded. Although the presumed Baltic loan base lacks phonological features of diagnostic value, the word’s geographical distribution indicates that it could have been borrowed from Curonian. The proposed connection between kaugas ‘men’s shirt breast with a double waist, used as a pocket; wallet’ and latvian kabata ‘pocket’ requires a remarkably complicated phonological adaptation for a relatively recent borrowing and is unconvincing. kaugas is most likely an older Baltic loan, having originated from the stem *kauk-, the possible Indo-European archetype of which is *(s)keu- / *kou- ‘to make curved, curved, hollow, cavity’ and/or *(s)keu- ‘to cover (up), wrap (up)’. The members of this large and diverse Baltic word family include Lithuanian káukė ‘mask, face cover, gas mask’, kiáuklas / kiáukutas ‘cover, shell’, káukė ‘mortar, wooden ladle, dish, basin etc.’, kaukẽlė ‘wooden dish’ and others. kaugas does not denote a pocket on a garment in today’s meaning. A pocket woven/sewn into a piece of clothing is a sufficiently new phenomenon that the Baltic loan base could not possibly have carried that meaning. Among the oldest forerunners of pockets was a piece of skin, which could be pulled with the aid of a sheep-split into the shape of a small round bag or purse. In this context, derivations of the *kauk- stem such as káukė and kiáuklas / kiáukutas can be seen to fit in the semantic field of the loan base. Estonian words for ‘pocket’ such as tasku, vikk, 231 kalits, kulit etc. have been borrowed into estonian on the basis of words in other languages denoting pockets. Kaugas is not among them, as it belongs to a much earlier loanword stratum. The Baltic loan base *kaukāl- / *kaukōl- ‘vessel hollowed out from a tree trunk’, the successor of which is e.g. lithuanian kaukẽlė ‘wooden dish’ has been borrowed into Finnic as *kaukal-: Salaca livonian kougil, Karelian koùgõl ‘kneading trough’, votic kaukalo / kaukolo ‘trough hollowed out of wood’, Finnish kaukalo ‘trough’ etc. the sequence -Vl in these Finnic words is the representation of the loan base’s productive deverbal affix *āl- / *ōl-, one of the essential meanings of which is conveying the result of an action. An earlier explanation held kaukalo and its equivalents to be derived from the stem kauka-‘distant, far, for a long time’, on the basis of the fact that kaukalo denotes an oblong vessel. This is, however, merely a folk etymology. The Baltic loan base contains a reference to the way in which such vessels were made.
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The article presents alternative etymologies for the estonian words hangeldama ‘to traffic in, speculate’ and nurg : nuru ‘blicca bjoerkna’. In Estonian etymological literature, it is claimed that the German borrowing hangeldama ‘to buy up and sell at a profit, to traffic in, speculate’ (< German handeln ‘to trade’) has undergone a phonological replacement likely on the example of hankima ‘to procure, obtain’. However, the secondary -ng- in the place of the expected -nd- is observed in a number of other borrowings, which suggests that this is a widespread optional replacement. the article gives examples of this replacement in other borrowings, such as angel ‘part of the wheel and axle of an anchor, a well, or similar, around which the wheel and axle is rotated’ – andel(i) id., cf. Low German, Dutch handel ‘handhold’, German Hantel ‘handhold’ etc. the ng / nd variation appears in native stems with a particular phonological structure, with overlapping or very similar fields of meaning, e.g. kangla : kan´gla, kangli: kan´gli – kandla : kan´dla / kandle, kandli : kan´dli ‘armpit’ and others. the nk / ng : nt / nd variation is typical of onomatopoetic/descriptive stems with over- lapping or very similar fields of meaning, e.g. põngerjas – põnder / põnderjas / põnderlas ‘brat, small child’: põng(e)- and others. In Estonian etymological literature, it is claimed that the origin of the fish nurg : nuru ‘blicca bjoerkna’ is unclear. this name is quite widespread. Also recorded is the variant stem nurr, nurra- : nurrakala. Wiedemann’s dictionary also gives the variant nuuru-k[ala], which has not been recorded in later collections of dialect data. the article draws attention to the Latvian name ņura for the loach (Nemachilus barbatus), which Latvian fish name researcher Benita Laumane regards as a borrowing, from Estonian nurg. in many languages, the names for loaches include numerous variants deriving from the notion of “beard”, in reference to the barbels around the fish’s mouth. There is no doubt that the Latvian nura, of estonian origin, also has its roots in this idea, assuming an etymological connection between estonian nurg and the word family nurrud, nurru-, nurri-, nuru- and nuri/karvad ‘whiskers, moustache’. This Estonian word family derives from the German loan base Schnurr, which appears in e.g. the compound word Schnurrbart ‘whiskers, moustache’. German Schnurrbart also denotes the fish Enchelyopus cimbrius or Gadus cimbricus, belonging to the cod family. In the Latvian name ņura ‘loach’, the word-initial consonant cluster has been reduced to a single consonant, indicating that this is an indirect loan via Estonian, not a direct loan from German. This loanword is interesting, because it demonstrates that Estonian nurr / nurg could at some point have been used to refer to the loach or some other type of fish with “whiskers”. The article also draws attention to the fact that the -g in the variant nurg is non-etymological, having developed by way of proportional analogy, e.g. urg : uru = x : nuru. Non-etymological -g after r is found in Estonian in e.g. kiirg : kiira ‘crown (of the head); nape; frontal bone’, neerg ‘kidney’, suhkarg ‘dried bread, rusk’.
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The hereby paper aims at corroborating the information provided by lexicographical sources for a range of Spanish idioms including the word boca and their Romanian equivalents, by means of a contextual analysis model. The semantic behaviour will be analysed based on contexts found on the internet, and our approach will deal both with convergences and divergences, so that a clear assessment may be performed and pertinent conclusions may be drawn. Moreover, aspects such as positive or negative connotation, language levels, the type of subject or object the idiom can refer to in the two languages, etc. will be observed.
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This paper focuses on two questions. Firstly, how the use of argumentative anaphora to express an opinion / truth dissociation (Perelman) should be described in terms of grammatical / lexical resources. The other question has a methodological dimension: in which aspects could this approach distinguish itself from linguistic or discursive studies?
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The paper considers the anomalous use of definiteness and gender in Bulgarian noun phrases containing hypocoristic names, nicknames or sometimes even legal personal names. Proper names of people, being semantically definite, usually do not take the definite article in Bulgarian. But in the cases considered it is just the opposite – in informal conversation, in fiction or in ironic statements the use of a definite article is either obligatory or facultative depending on the formal and semantic features of the names. The factors to trigger the anomalous use described may be the female sex of the designee, the less typical ending of the noun, its being grammatically neuter or its inclusion in an attributive phrase. Thus the female legal personal names (e.g. Marija, Elena) may take a definite article on some special occasions (Marijata, Elenata) but male legal personal names (e.g. Boris) cannot. Male legal or hypocoristic names ending in -o (Stojko, Borko
The article is devoted to the analysis of the ways of expressing the speech act of approval in Polish, Russian and English. The material has been gathered from corpora, and only the examples have been taken into consideration where the phrase uttered by a speaker is introduced in the narration part as approval. This method of collecting material gives the opportunity to avoid misunderstanding in the process of the interpretation of the speaker’s intentions. It occurs that approval introduced in the narrative part of a text is more often nonverbal in Polish and English materials. The lexical markers of the speech act under investigation display a considerable number of similarities between Polish, Russian and English examples. The utterances are usually stylistically neutral and they are generally simple in structure.
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Knowledge of people’s health information needs and information behaviour can be used in planning health interventions in a way that they would meet people’s needs as accurately as possible and reflect how health information is acquired and processed. Aim. The aim of the study presented in this paper was to analyze the usefulness of online forums as a source of scientific knowledge about people’s health needs and information behaviour, which could then be actively used in the area of public health. Method. The content, a total of 1,575 entries, derived from two open forums devoted to depression in the years 2012–2015 was analysed using a set of mixed methods, including: a formal (quantitative) analysis of the material using the tools of computational linguistics (QDAMiner Simsat), inductive theme analysis EMIC, in the so-called hard variety, reinforced by elements of Awdiejew’s conversational grammar, and comparative method. Results. Both health information needs and behaviour can be identified on Internet forums dedicated to health problems. Linguistic analysis of online forums can give very interesting results and clues that cannot be obtained using questionnaires or personal interviews. It seems, however, that it should never be the only method used in investigating this matter. Since there are several intervening factors that may distort reliability of findings, determining whether we are dealing with real or created needs or behaviour requires confirming the results of the linguistic analysis of the forums using other methods.
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The focus of this article is on the prolific and variegated translation possibilities of the substantivations of Ancient Greek in the text under translation into Latvian – Aristotle's „Rhetoric”. The potential translations of Ancient Greek substantivations are examined from the viewpoint of conversion, elliptic substantivations and substantivated sentences and wider linguistic formations in an attempt to establish an experience-based, motivated system for translating Ancient Greek substantivations into Latvian. In the course of this inquisition the authors come to the conclusion that it is only partially possible to translate directly the Ancient Greek substantivations, but for the most part one has to find an equivalent syntactical construction that has no signs of a substantivation in the Latvian language. Thus the inquiry into the translation of substantivations summons a larger-scale discussion about the difficulties of translation, causing to thoroughly think over the sought for translational harmony both of the thought and grammatical expression.
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Phraseological units, primarily idioms are those types of linguistic units which reveal to a great extent how certain linguistic community copes with its surroundings. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how idioms in English language are actually differently used across different genres in British and American linguistic communities, and try to explain those results in light of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The study was conducted on the basis of the idioms that have the same body part, namely arm and/or leg, and those idioms were then compared in two corpora – the BNC (British National Corpus) and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English).
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In this article an attempt is made to pinpoint all possibilities of expressing aspectual meanings in Lithuanian copular constructions. The author departs from the tradition of distinguishing only perfective vs. imperfective aspect in Lithuanian. Instead, in testing various possibilities of expressing aspect in the constructions under discussion, the relevant meanings are chosen from a wider range of aspectual grams established in recent typological work on aspect. Until now the aspect of copular constructions had remained an understudied and underdescribed topic not only in Lithuanian. This is because the main concern of linguists has been with general problems of predication (or identification) in equative structures. Researchers (mainly of the formal persuasion) have based their accounts on copular sentences where the copula “be”, more specifically its present tense form, is taken to be the default case. Of course such ‘default’ copular constructions deliver an unproblematic aspectual meaning, that of imperfective state. Empirically, however, present tense (or zero) copulas are the default instance only in the case of identificational equatives, for identity statements typically assert general truths that are ‘timeless’ or ‘omnitemporal’. As this research has shown, the remaining types of copular constructions have a much wider potential for choosing the desired aspectual meaning. First of all, the functional−structural properties of these constructions and the contexts in which they are used provide much more space for aspect−tense variation in their copular verbs than in the default cases of identificational equatives. Secondly, the aspectual properties of the copular construction can be changed externally by introducing, at clausal level, specialized adverbials or periphrastic aspectual constructions, such as jau ‘already’, du kartus ‘twice’, buvo be-tampąs, bet… ‘he was about to become, but…’ etc.; in this case the aspectual interpretation of the copula is coerced in line with the overall aspectual profile of the construction. Thirdly, the range of aspectual meanings in the copular constructions becomes even wider if we take into account other copulas than “be”, viz. those of dynamic or locative origin. The typological research of recent decades in this field (Stassen 1997; Pustet 2003) has shown that cross-linguistically it is not unusual for copulas to be grammaticalized from different lexical sources. One may reasonably suppose that one of the motives for including new lexemes in the class of copulas was the need of expressing relevant aspectual meanings in the predication of identity, i.e. in various types of copular constructions. So languages tend to have, in addition to their main copula, a small number of verbs that can qualify as copulas and that mainly serve the needs of aspectual expression in their constructions. In Lithuanian these copular verbs are tapti, pasidaryti / darytis ‘become’, virsti ‘turn into’, likti ‘remain’. Depending on their tense and syntactic environment, ‘dynamic’ copulas can express ingressive, progressive or habitual aspect. The copula likti denotes continuation of the profiled situation, as does the prefixed form tebe-būti (tebe-(nebe-) being the usual marker of (phasal / aspectual) continuative meaning in Lithuanian). In the article due attention is also paid to the aspectual properties of the different types of copular constructions. In his earlier works the author has provided a new classification based on the idea of type instantiation, developed by Ronald Langacker (1991). In the second section of this paper these types are briefly passed in review, but the classification is updated and enriched with new discussion. The main idea behind the new classification is that all types of copular constructions are treated as instantiations of one archetype, that of the identity relation. What distinguishes these constructional types is the syntactic class of their predicative complements (adjective vs. noun) and additionally, in the case of predicative nominals, their referential properties. Before turning, in the fourth section, to a discussion of concrete aspectual meanings as expressed in different types of copular constructions, the author first makes a brief excursion, in the third section, to the typology of strategies for encoding predicatives as defined in Leon Stassen’s comprehensive typological study on intransitive predication (1997). This seemed necessary as one may suspect that variation in this domain of morphosyntactic encoding is to a great extent motivated by the need of expressing additional aspectual meanings in the constructions under discussion.
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In Poland, Dutch is becoming gradually a popular foreign language. It belongs to the Germanic languages, which have a verbal system with tenses. Polish is a Slavonic language with an aspectual verb system. In Polish there are 3 grammatical tenses: present tense, future tense and past tense. Polish verbs can be used in a perfective and an imperfective aspect. In Dutch we have 8 tenses. Four of them are voltooid (perfect) describing the situation or action as completed and the other four are onvoltooid (imperfect), they describe the situation or action as continuous or progressive. As all Germanic languages, Dutch lost aspect as an obligatory grammatical category. The perfective and imperfective aspect of the verb depends on other parts of the sentence.
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In the presented paper we try to propose Slovak equivalents to the German terminology related to the valence of the German verbs, dependency syntax and sentence semantics with the aim to optimize and unify the presented terminology in the Slovak language. In the first part, we introduce and subsequently also exemplify a possible inventory of the in-depth grammatical cases that directly participate on constitution of semantic sentence models, as far as they are anchored in sememe of the verbal lexeme. In the second part of our paper, we emphasize the actant terminology reflecting morphosyntactic realization of individual participants of the grammatical aspect in composition of German sentences. In this connection, we particularly want to unify the Slovak terminology denominating individual actant classes into the form which we can use also in linguistic and didactic practice. We are aware of a need to make valence grammar more popular, while achievement of this goal also assumes its reflection in the process of language teaching.
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