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Conference report from Solemn academy dedicated to the linguist Mahir Domi held in Tirana, 13 March 2015.
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Conference report: „Remzi Pëmaska: an important personality in Albanian linguistics“ held in Elbasan on 24 April 2015
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Conference report: “Linguistic researches”, IV held in Tirana on 10 July 2015
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Broadly speaking, language policy in legislation is a key mechanism for an efficient creation of legal acts. The efficient creation of legal acts implies an active cooperation between legal and linguistic experts, consistent use of terminology, a clear writing style and a mandatory legal-linguistic editing/revision. Such an approach is the only guarantee that the language of legal acts will avoid ambiguities and that it will be comprehensible to both legal and public addressees, since legal acts apply to all citizens. Furthermore, successful translation of EU acts into any language is only possible if the target language has been standardized, particularly in terms of legal terminology, which is especially important for the countries still striving towards EU membership. This paper provides an overview of the current language-policy situation in the three-lingual legislation of BiH, focusing on the problem of non-standardized terminology which, for the time being, significantly slows down the process of the translation of EU acquis, thereby also impeding the alignment of BiH legislation with that of the EU.
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At the time when Austro - Hungarian authority proclaimed the term Bosnian language official, numerous newspapers and periodicals, published during the period of its rule, insisted on phonetically orthographic principle emphasizing its advantage over etymologically orthographic solutions. In orthographic discussions certain resistance to introducing Cyrillic into schools and official use was put up. The fact that this writing system was old-fashioned and that it should be replaced by a modern Latin script served as an apology for this resistance. At that period another graphological selection emerged. Namely Bosnians were deprived of arebica, the writing system they used for years. For many Bosnians that was the only graphological expression. Even though the debates on graphological and orthographic solutions that were opened in this period were directed towards the language functioning in an unorganized and unobligatory manner, during the time and in many segments they achieved a pronounced stability, almost a consistent norm. Consequently they exist even today as a settled heritage.
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In one historical period the Bosniaks linked their literacy to oriental languages, especially Arabic, which they didn’t experience as something that was imposed upon them, but embraced it as the language of Islam and endeavoured to learn Arabic along with the native Bosnian language. Under conditions of strong oriental tradition, the Bosnian language gained special importance, for with it the Bosniaks were confirming their Slavic affiliation. In such a way, a ‘Bosniaks’ had assumed a particular attitude towards oriental tradition and within the framework of this tradition a special place was occupied by translation of religious books into Bosnian. In this way, the Bosniaks were creating a stronger bond with their ethnic-linguistic roots.
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Swearwords and vulgarisms are traditionally considered to be taboo words, which is indeed true when observed from the perspective of standard language and standard language policy. However, in hip-hop, the criteria mentioned above are not applicable since the usage of such lexis is a constant feature or, more precisely, ‘the ID’ of the genre. In that sense, the lexis of swearwords and vulgarisms is a ‘norm’ typical for the music genre, but also a means to shock the public by protesting against the Philistine mentality and expectations, and consequently, revolt against the society as such. Therefore, the role of such lexemes in hip-hop is primarily expressive. At times, they have an identification role, when observed as discourse markers found on the margins of the society.
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The paper focuses on how different word classes come into contact and/or are confronted, which results in various kinds of hybridisation of both individual words and of word classes they belong to. Two basic types of hybridisation can be distinguished: categorical and functional. The former occurs on the level of form or word and the latter on the syntactic level. Categorical hybridisation is characterised by hybrids composed of verbs and other word classes (verbal adjectives, verbal adverbs and verbal nouns) and the fact that some word classes, foremostly pronouns and numbers can be classified into nominal, adjectival and adverbial classes. Functional hybridisation is characterised by the fact that words occur in larger syntactic units that are not typical for them and this results in nominalisation of adjectives, adjectivalisation and adverbialisation of nouns, prepositionalisation of adverbs, adverbialisation of prepositions, subjunctivisation of pronouns and particles, particulation of conjuncts, etc.
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The Bosnian grammars give mostly a wrong interpretation of the conjunctions as a separate morphological word class, but not syntactic, which nodoubt they are. Almost all Bosnian grammars offer the basic descriptions of conjunctions in the morphology section using its methodology and terminology, which is absolutely unappropriate. The morphological approach inevitably leeds to heaping up of the terms which refer to the conjunctions (for example, conjunctional word, conjunctional expression, conjunctional construction, conjunctional adverb, particle with conjunctional function etc.), which seriously makes unclear the notion of the conjunctions and causes confusion (as if we spoke about ‘nominal words’ implying nouns, or ‘pronominal nouns’,or ‘verbs with nominal function’ etc.). The defining of the conjunctions in the Bosnian grammars is not based on clear criteria. That is the reason why we have numerous dilemmas about words and constructions of words, whether they belong to the category of conjunctions or not. As a result, we find the lists of conjunctions which contain many words that are not conjunctions and at the same time many words that belong to the category of conjunctions are missing. Finally, the wrong approach to the conjunctions in the Bosnian grammars leads to their classifications which are not too useful, or which are even harmful. Moreover, the Bosnian grammarians are not mostly aware of the role of conjunctions as formal indicators of the basic division between the coordination and the subordination in syntax, which is very important. It seems to me that a lot of missunderstanding and confusion will be avoided if we accept the following definition: the conjunctions are words or functionally unified constructions of words which connect the syntactic elements in syntactic units of the same or higher syntactic level. The conjunctions as a category are asyntactic notion and consequently have to be described in the scope of syntax, using its methodology and terminology.
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The acquisition of verb morphology presents a challenge for learners of Croatian as a foreign language for a number of reasons (such as various phonological and morphological features, or the unsystematic presentation of content in grammar books). Therefore, our aim was to analyse the presentation of verb morphology in beginner-level textbooks for Croatian as a foreign language. We based our reasoning on the communicative approach to grammar and looked at the following: a) the order of presentation of tense and modality, b) the underlying principles of presentation, and c) the methodological approach. Although textbooks differ in their approaches to verb morphology, the analysis indicates that some of them are moving toward the communicative approach to grammar, appropriately applying the principles of prototype, frequency and progression.
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This paper focuses on one of the most important theories of humour research in linguistics: the General Theory of Verbal Humour, more precisely, on one of the Knowledge Resources (KRs) proposed in the theory: the Logical Mechanism (LM). This parameter contains different scripts in a joke, operating in different ways. On this occasion, the focus is on the figure-ground reversal, a phenomenon observed in different sciences, including linguistics. Here it is observed as an asymmetry in which some semantic content (figure and ground) is manipulated to achieve the punchline. Four jokes in English and Bosnian respectively are selected and analysed for the purpose of observing the way in which the figure-ground reversal occurs, causing the distorted reality of jokes.
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Der Schwerpunkt dieser Arbeit bezieht sich auf die Übersetzung der substantivischen Komposita aus dem Deutschen ins Bosnische bzw. umgekehrt. Bei der Übersetzung kommt es zu Schwierigkeiten, da die deutsche Sprache viel mehr Freiheit in Bezug auf die bosnische Sprache hat. In dieser Arbeit ist das Ziel, die Komposition der Substantive der deutschen und bosnischen Sprache zu definieren. In der deutschen Sprache sind die Zusammensetzungen von drei und mehreren Wörtern möglich, wobei das in der bosnischen Sprache nicht üblich ist. Einige Übersetzungen in die bosnische Sprache sind möglich, aber einige müssen umschrieben werden, da die direkte Übersetzung keinen Sinn macht. Da kommt es zu einem Problem, da eine Zusammenbildung in der bosnischen Sprache nicht möglich ist wie in der deutschen Sprache, deshalb wurden die Komposita auf verschiedene Art und Weise übersetzt. Hier wurden einige Übersetzungsmöglichkeiten dargestellt. Das Kompositum wird als ein Substantiv, als ein Verb, als eine Paraphrase und in der Kombination Adjektiv – Substantiv übersetzt.
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This paper investigates the use of weasel claims in advertisements in English and Serbian. Weasel claims represent a form of covert communication and are characterized by the use of deliberately vague and misleading language. In the advertising discourse, this linguistic device helps advertisers to deal with sensitive issues, overcome consumers' distrust and thus influence their behavior. The research has been conducted on a corpus of 100 advertisements that belong to various categories, such as cars, cleaning products, cosmetics, drinks, food, etc., published in printed magazines and online sources from the year 2000 onwards. The aim of the analysis is to identify manifestations of weasel claims in the corpus, establish similarities and differences regarding their use in the given languages, and show how they influence the interpretation of the advertising message and create consumer behavioral patterns. Descriptive and contrastive analyses have been employed in the research. The study also draws on Grice's Cooperative Principle. The results will show that this deceptive tool is widespread in both languages and that its use in the advertising discourse in Serbian requires further research.
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Since Spanish and Croatian belong to different language groups their entire language structures are different. Spanish is an analytic language, so it does not use cases and morphological case endings to determine the noun’s function in a sentence. Croatian, on the other hand, is synthetic, with seven cases and morphological case endings. Precisely because of this difference, prepositions in these two languages have a different scope of use. This paper analyses the meanings of the Spanish preposition desde and provides examples for each of them from the chosen corpus. At the same time it presents its Croatian translational equivalents. From this analysis we can see that the meanings of the Spanish preposition desde are expressed by using three Croatian prepositions: od, iz, s.
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This paper deals with the word formation modes used in construction of male and female personal names recorded in villages located in the river Kosanica basin which is the largest tributary of the river Toplica. Materials for this paper were collected in the period between 1996 and 2006. Recorded onomastic materials belongs to 40 Kosanica villages, from Kuršumlijska Banja, Samokov and Krčmar to southern Kosanica villages Dobri Do, Trn, Trpeze, Sekirača, Vasiljevac and Merdare. More than 2355 male and female personal names have been collected. Our paper has been concerned with morphology and word formation processes which are used in structuring of the male and female personal names in the examined area.
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Condition includes quite broad semantic extent. Just defining condition includes the exploration of logic and its items of logical judgements. Therefore, it comes to the conclusion that the semantic field of conditions is closely related to philosophy. Despite different semantic relations, the condition could be universally defined as the requirement for performing a certain action. Depending on whether is real, potential or unreal, the action will be performed, may be performed or it will not be performed.
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The relationship between the phraseme and the sevdalinka takes place in three directions: as a part of oral literature, sevdalinka was involved in the production of the phrasemes; as a text which is relatively unaffected in the form of transfers from one generation to next, the sevdalinka keeps phrasemes which are no longer used, making them idyomatic, and testifies about the age of phrasemes which are still in use; as a poetic text, the sevdalinka „broke“ phrasemes. This concerns the syntax structure of the phraseme, and that opens the question of whether it is possible to declare the phrasal construction as the phraseme, which would then redefine the phraseme as a combination of two or more headwords and expand on the construction of head and depend words.
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Although it lacks grammaticalized categories of definite and indefinite articles and its “bare” nouns are (usually) ambiguous between a definite and indefinite interpretation, Serbo-Croatian has appropriate lexical items for marking discourse-old and discourse-new nominal referents. I demonstrate that there are contexts in which use of these discourse markers is obligatory for obtaining the intended reading, as the “bare” nominal phrase would unambiguously be interpreted as definite or indefinite, depending on the context. More importantly, when present, these discourse markers block left branch and adjunct extractions from the rest of the NP, indicating that a determiner phrase might be projected, even in an article less language.
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The paper presents an analysis of Croatian agentive nominals with the suffix -ač within the Distributed Morphology approach, adopting and applying Alexiadou & Schäfer’s (2010) model. The internal morphological structure of the -ač nouns, and their eventive properties were considered in detail. The analysis has shown that the eventive/non-eventive properties of -ač nouns do not depend on animacy, but rather on the episodic vs. dispositional distinction. However, instrument nominals are distinguished from animate nominals in some respects. Croatian -ač nouns exhibit properties that cannot be completely captured by the framework adopted.
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