We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
The article discusses the possible Baltic etymology of the Finnic *kerk(k)ä ’annual growth of the top or twigs of coniferous trees, whorl etc; cone of spruce or pine’: Baltic *kerk-: Lithuanian kerkulė ’two or more trees grown from one stump’, kerkutys ’bi- or multifurcated branch etc’, kirkužė etc ’cone of pine or spruce’, Latvian ķirkurs etc, cirkuzis etc ’pine cone’.
More...
This paper investigates the semantic functions and the distribution of the Conditional and the Conditional-Conjunctive moods in Moksha Mordvin. Based on corpus data from Standard Moksha, I argue that these grammatical moods are not contiguous in semantic space: they rarely occur in hypothetical conditional clauses. The Conditional-Conjunctive is more restricted than the Conditional, both functionally and syntagmatically, as the former is not compatible with directive speech acts in the main clause, it requires that the predicate of the main clause is in the Conjunctive, it resists the occurrence of a correlative apodosis marker in the main clause, and it rarely occurs in postposed or inserted conditional clauses.
More...
Dictionaries and text examples are used to analyse the senses of the word чудь in modern Komi and to define the diachronic relationships between those senses. By today, the word has become a polysemantic unit, while its original ethnic sense has faded making room for some new ones. Of the latter meanings, the pejorative and the poetic are of particular interest. So the word чудь has come to serve as a poetic synonym for ethnonym komi.
More...
Šventoji 43 is one of eight Comb Ware culture sites known in Lithuania at present. The site was excavated in 2013 and 2014 and revealed a homogeneous pottery assemblage, which was classified as Comb Ware and was radiocarbon dated to 3900–3650 cal BC. As a result of this dating, it has been found that Comb Ware is the oldest pottery type to have been produced in coastal Lithuania. In fact, the pottery assemblage of Šventoji 43 also suggests that Comb Ware originates from a distinct phase in the pottery sequence of coastal Lithuania that both predates all other phases from Šventoji pottery bearing sites and has not been previously recognized in other assemblages. Zoo-archaeological analysis has revealed that the site was occupied during the early spring and mostly used for fishing zander and pike in the lagoonal lake and for hunting seals and forest game. The unique character of the flint industry, which combined hard hammer percussion and bipolar knapping that resulted in the production of microliths on irregular blades, suggests that the local Šventoji 43 community had Mesolithic roots. Furthermore, this evidence supports the hypothesis that Comb Ware had reached Lithuania through intense contact between East Baltic hunter-gatherers rather than due to a mass migration of the population from the Northeastern Baltic. The much wider distribution of Finno-Ugric hydronyms, compared to that of Comb Ware sites gives an impression that some other Subneolithic pottery types in addition to Comb Ware might have been produced by Finno-Ugric speaking people.
More...
The article deals with Mari musical terms extracted from the ten early editions of Mari music (1908-1937) by V. Vasil'jev, Ikumari (G. Leont'jev), I. Palantaj, J. Ešpaj, A. Iskandarov, G. Lobačev. Basically, these terms define genre, character, tempo, and dynamics, but there are also analytical terms relating to harmony, rhythm, texture, and form (mainly in the publication by V. Vasil'jev (Васильев 1937)). The article presents a dictionary of these terms. They are not only of historical significance, but can be useful in the contemporary development of the system of Mari musical terminology.
More...
In the article, the lexical and semantic field of verbs of sound in Komi is analyzed. It covers a large layer of verbal vocabulary, therefore, their analysis is of interest. All the verbs of sound in this contribution are grouped by their content according to the main features denoting the reproduction of any sounds by humans, animals, insects or birds, as well as representions of noises of animate and inanimate nature.
More...A magyar kutya vezérszavú frazémák archaikus rétege kognitív nyelvészeti megközelítésben
The subject of the current paper is the cognitive linguistic analysis of archaic Hungarian idioms with the component kutya (’dog’), with the goal of determining whether these idioms share common characteristics that could explain which factors may lead to the disappearance of idioms from the standard language. The analysis of archaic idioms showed that several cognitive phenomena may contribute to an idiom falling out of use, which, in the case of the analyzed idioms, include a change in the prototype of the concept of DOG, the reduction of the VILLAGE frame, as well as the disappearance of certain concepts from the contemporary Hungarian speakers' conceptual systems.
More...
The subject of the paper is to present the textological features of dramatic dialogues. Linguistic tools are approached from a functional point of view, which aims to demonstrate their communicative role. The purpose of this study is to describe the general characteristics of dramatic dialogues and the spoken language characteristics that result in the spontaneous nature of the given texts; the results of the study provide insight into the mental processes required to create and interpret texts.
More...
The stigmatization of dialects is one of the main reasons for their disappearance. Under minority circumstances there are at least two high prestige varieties as opposed to the dialect of native speakers. Thus the stigmatization of the dialect speech leads to a weakened sense of comfort in the use of the mother tongue, resulting in the erosion of the native dialect at a rapid pace. Traditionally the teaching of Hungarian in the Hungarian educational system is characterized by the substractive approach, which means that the standard language variety replaces the vernacular variety. By applying the additive approach, the original dialect of the student is not damaged, the standard variety is added to it: thus the language repertoire of the child is broadened. The study is analyze how the substractive and the additive approach are reflected in the new textbooks.
More...
The word order in a sentence is formed depending on the communicative value function of the components, their informative and communicative aspects separate them into more pronounced and less pronounced components. Some 20th century linguistic schools changed their sentence approach concerning the sentence structure and phrases layout. While the traditional grammars still keep in mind the assessment of the sentence from subject-predicate structure view, the communicative aspect texts keep in mind first the sentence components communicative value (dynamism). The theme of study subject is the communicative examination of the use of the modifiers of time and their function in Géza Csáth journal entries. I carried out the journal entries analysis of the modifiers of time in four positions (sentence modifier, topic, focus and predicate modifier) on the base of Katalin É. Kiss sentence model.
More...
The paper investigates pre-D non-possessor positions in Hungarian. In Hungarian, non-deverbal nominal constructions containing pre-D non-possessor positions are acceptable only if they contain a demonstrative pronoun and also an adjective, and the appearance of a pre-D possessor does not impact the acceptability of the sentence. The paper also gives a brief discussion of similar constructions with pre-D non-possessors in German, mainly to shed light on the Hungarian data. Although German also allows for pre-D non-possessors, it does so under different conditions. A short topicalized element can readily appear in German sentences as a non-possessor dependent, but in this language a possessor can never appear in the same noun phrase. The paper also discusses deverbal nominal constructions with pre-D non-possessor dependents in Hungarian. In these constructions the presence of a possessor argument is indispensable. This is due to the fact that the placement of the non-possessor argument in a position preceding the possessor is legitimized by the fact that the former takes scope over the latter within the internal information structure of the matrix noun phrase. The paper also deals with the syntactic structure of said deverbal nominals.
More...
Hungarian relevant-set based operators, such as universally quantified noun-phrases and the also-quantifier, signal a logico-pragmatic relation between their explicit meaning and a broader implicit set of relevant participants which property can be mentioned as “double referentiality” of the operator. Furthermore, they indicate the new or correcting information in a topic–predicate dimension which belongs to the broader world of the discourse. Our research aims to identify the differences by investigating the suprasegmental features of each-quantifiers and alsoquantifiers on the Hungarian left-periphery indicating the two functions in the topic–predicate dimension. Short sentences in which quantifiers functioning either as the main (new/correcting) information or as a topic (anchor of relevant information) were read by 41 non-linguist native Hungarian subjects. The pitch, intensity and duration properties were analyzed by Praat. On the basis of paired t-tests of the data, it can be stated that a two-dimension model of information structure is required to capture the phenomenon.
More...
The adverb tiide ‘awry, aslant’ and the related tiideviltu id., identified as dialect words in modern Estonian dictionaries, appear primarily in the Islands and Western dialects. The standard language also includes the adverb tiidakil ‘sunk askew, falling over; crooked, aslant’, apparently sharing the same stem, which has also been observed in dialects, recorded primarily in the 19th century, in the meaning of ‘folded into a triangle’. Julius Mägiste conjectured that the adverb tiidakil (? also tiide, tiideviltu) is etymologically related to the stem tiib ‘wing’. This article suggests a development path wherein tiide is a shortening of the compound word tiideviltu, which in turn developed via sporadic plosive alternation and folk-etymological interpretation from the loan word piidevint, piidevinti ‘headwind, against the wind’ (< Low German bi de wind or Dutch bij de(n) wind), compare to the dialectal variant tiidevinti. The word tiide may have influenced the meaning of the word tiidakil in the standard language, despite its perhaps different origin. The Estonian word toru ‘pipe, tube’ and its Finnish equivalent toro ‘(mill) hopper; gutter, pipe; jug spout’ have been etymologically connected to the Finnic stem torV- ~ törV- ‘to extend forward, be stretched out’. Osmo Nikkilä regards Finnish toro as a diminutive derivative of the Finnic stem *torvi ‘horn’ (a Baltic loan), in which the v has been elided before a labial vowel (*torv-o > toro). The article analyzes this same possible explanation for Estonian toru. In Estonian the elision of the phoneme v before a labial vowel is common. In dialects, v can be elided also between a consonant and i. The diminutive source form explains the absence of v in both the word toru (< *torvo(i)) and its dialectal variant tori (< *torvei) in all case forms. The semantic shift ‘horn’ > ‘pipe, tube’ is natural as well.
More...
Change-of-state can be associated with inchoative meanings, transition from one state to another, usually with the focus on the new state, but it can also be linked to the emergence of a situation or an entity, or change of possession. In every Finnic language, there tends to be one such predicate that is used to express change, but it is never the only one. This paper presents an analysis of the usage of seven predicates – BE BORN, BECOME, COME, DO, GO, REMAIN, WILL BE – that can be employed to convey change in the Finnic languages. The article set out to compare similarities/differences in the use of the aforementioned predicates in five intransitive clause types: (i) unmarked clauses, (ii) elative-marked result clauses, (iii) experiential clauses, (iv) existential clauses, and (v) possessive clauses. The aim was to see what meaning nuances can be associated with these clause types, how the clause types are interrelated and what this reveals about the frequency of use of various predicates in a language. The main attention was devoted to six Finnic varieties: Ingrian, Ludian, Lutsi (a language island of Estonian), Valdai Karelian, Veps, and Votic. The data used in the study originated from various collections of text, language corpora, dictionaries, and my own fieldwork data. In the final data set, each language was represented with 100 examples. Finnish, Estonian, and Livonian were included in the study based on previous results. The study showed that the greatest variety of predicates (typically 3 out of 7) was used in existential clauses, which express emergence of a situation or an entity. Existential clauses were all in all the commonest in the data set (212 occurrences among 600 examples). Furthermore, some predicates in a language could only be found in this type (e.g. all the uses of TULLA in Veps belonged to this type). As a result, it was regarded as the most central clause type, which is most probably responsible for the spread of change-of-state predicates. Existential clauses showed connections with all other clause types, both directly as well as indirectly. Whereas unmarked clauses and elative-marked result clauses most commonly expressed change from state 1 → state 2, they could also be found to express an emergence of something in a similar way to existential clauses. In possessive and experiential clauses, the connection was especially evident if one would leave out the possessee or the change experiencer, respectively. As a result, they could be easily subsumed under existential clauses in such a case. To compare, while in existential clauses about three different predicates occurred, experiential clauses could typically be associated with the predicate that is most generally used in the respective language. In general, the paper showed that the choice of change-of-state predicates depends on several factors. In addition to the differences in the occurrence of verbs in various clause types, the choice between various predicates also revealed lexical differences. For instance, especially GO and REMAIN appeared in fixed expressions or could be associated with specific meanings. Time reference turned out to play a role as well. For instance, in Veps, the expression of change in relation to the past was most typically expressed by means of DO (54/56 examples of DO occurred in the past tense), while in connection with the future WILL BE was used. In Valdai Karelian, in turn, the same predicate was used regardless of time reference. In the case of Valdai Karelian and Veps WILL BE, but also Ludian BE BORN and Lutsi BECOME, it was also possible to find usages where in connection with the future the expression of change was backgrounded and the following state foregrounded, which thus suggests the development CHANGE-OF-STATE → FUTURE.
More...
The article discusses demonstrative pronoun usage among new speakers of Võro and compares it to native speakers’ usage. Conclusions are drawn on the basis of empirical data obtained from a forced-choice production test. It is found that new speakers’ usage of demonstrative pronouns is substantially different from that of people who have acquired the Võro language at home and have regularly used it their whole life. While native speakers least frequently use the pronoun taa, which lacks a direct equivalent in Estonian, this pronoun is the demonstrative used most commonly by new speakers.The article also shows that, when using linguistic experiments to study an endangered minority language, one must pay attention to factors that are not as relevant for the majority language. For instance, after the experiment it is necessary to carry out a survey regarding how the informant has acquired the minority language as well as when, with whom and how often he/she uses and has used it. At the same time, there is a danger that the formality of the experiment situation may affect the usage of a minority language more than that of a majority language (e.g. the informant may switch to the majority language at some point during the experiment).
More...
Das Estnische ist bekannt für seine ternären Gegensätze. Bis zum 19. Jahrhundert konnten im Schriftbild nur lange und kurze Vokale unterschieden werden, da die estnische Rechtschreibung von Deutschen begründet wurde, die nicht glaubten, dass eine konsonantische Länge bedeutungsunterscheidend sein kann. In der modernen estnischen Rechtschreibung wird kein Unterschied zwischen langen und ultralangen Lauten gemacht (außer bei Klusilen), und auf Grundlage universeller phonologischer Theorien wurde versucht zu behaupten, dass ternäre Längenkontraste in Sprachen unmöglich sind. Dessen ungeachtet wurden neue Sprachen entdeckt, in denen zumindest die Vokale kurz, lang oder überlang sein können.
More...
This article gives an overview of a low-stake standardised test pilot study completed at primary school level (N = 249) in October 2019. The pilot study was undertaken as part of the Estonian Lifelong Learning Strategy 2020 (HTM 2014), which prescribes transitioning all general assessments on each education level in Estonia to a digital format. The article presents suggestions for the transition based on the preliminary analysis of the pilot study as well as an overview of the types of assignments that proved to be efficient considering the students’ digital capabilities among other things.The results show that the first stage students of basic school did a good job of taking the e-test. Somewhat surprisingly, the results of the 3rd and 4th grade students were quite similar. The easiest task was spelling with multiple-choice answers and listening to fiction, the most difficult task was to fill the gap with the correct word form.The average score (60.4%) indicates that the transition to e-assessment at the elementary level of primary school is feasible under certain conditions, especially when the results of the pilot study and the students’ digital literacy levels are taken into account.
More...
The article targets complaint sequences in Estonian everyday conversations with a focus on responses to complaints. A complaint is a social action by which speakers express dissatisfaction with a certain state of affairs. The aim of complaining is to show that the matter is worth complaining about and to get affiliation from the recipient. For this research 40 school-related complaint sequences were studied. The purpose of this research was to find out how recipients respond to complaints and how different responses affect the course of the complaining.The preferred response to complaining is displaying affiliation with the complainant. This is accomplished either by recipients displaying the same emotion towards the complainable matter, talking about a similar experience, developing the complaint further or agreeing neutrally. This kind of responses are followed by continuation of complaining. Responses that do not convey any stance towards the complaint, such as the continuer mhmh, show that the recipient is listening and are also followed by continuation of complaining. Another type of response that gives the complainant an opportunity to continue the complaint is recipients asking follow-up questions. Additionally, there occurred three types of non-preferred responses in our data: accounting for the complainable matter, giving advice to complainants and dismissing the complaint. In the case of non-preferred responses, complainants reject the advice, do not accept the account for the complainable matter nor the dismissal of the complaint. Our analysis shows that complaining is continued after accounts and often after dismissals of the complaint. In our data, the complaint sequence gets closed after the recipient’s advice-giving and sometimes after dismissals of the complaint.
More...