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Руски, М. (2016). Пасивът – средство за изразяване на авторитета в юридически текстове. София: Университетско издателство „Св. Климент Охридски“
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Руски, М. (2016). Пасивът – средство за изразяване на авторитета в юридически текстове. София: Университетско издателство „Св. Климент Охридски“
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Plosives in Estonian have been considered voiceless. However, analysis has shown that short plosives tend to get at least partially voiced and otherwise reduced in connected speech. This seems to be quite a universal tendency in different languages. The present paper investigates short plosives in intervocalic position in most frequent content words. Phonetic materials were extracted from the Phonetic Corpus of Estonian Spontaneous Speech. Patterns in the reduction of plosives and possible influences of stress and vowel context were investigated. Two kinds of allophones emerged – those that were fully realised and had a distinguishable release burst, and the reduced ones that had lost the burst phase. The amount of reduced tokens differentiated the velar plosive [k] from others. As [p] and [t] both had over 65% of fully realised tokens, but over 60% of [k] tokens were reduced. [k] also had most different allophones. Among fully realised tokens there were voiceless, partially voiced, and fully voiced allophones. The voiceless allophone was the rarest, 19% tokens of [p] and only 10% of [t] and [k] were voiceless. Most frequent allophones among phonemes were partially voiced for [p] (29%), fully voiced for [t] (37%), and reduced voiced for [k] (47%). Closure durations were related to place of articulation. [p] had the longest average durations and [t] the shortest. Across all tokens [k] and [t] had similar average durations but within allophones durations were closer between [k] and [p]. Burst durations were the longest, around 30 ms for [k] and almost the same duration, between 21–23 ms, for [p] and [t], with the exception of the voiceless allophone [t], which was 27 ms. Closure durations differed significantly between [p] and [t] and burst durations were significantly different between [k] and other phonemes. Stressed positions included both lexical and contrastive stresses. Stress had some effect on the allophonic distribution but almost none on durations. As expected, there were more voiceless and partially voiced tokens in stressed position and more reduced tokens and total loss in unstressed position. Differences were the biggest for [t] and the smallest for [k]. Durations differed very little, whereas none were statistically significant. Vowel context had some influence on allophonic distribution. The influence was the biggest on [t]. Overall, there were more fricative and approximant tokens around [i].[t] had more partially voiced tokens and less voiced tokens around labial vowels [o, u]. There were more reduced [k] tokens around [a] and [i]. On durations the vowel context again influenced [t] the most. Durations between all vowel contexts were statistically different for [t] (p<.01); the longest durations appeared after [i]. In general, the present study confirms the results of the previous ones. Allophonic distribution is very similar to the previous study of Estonian spontaneous speech. Closures were at least partially voiced in most cases which refer to carry-over voicing of the previous vowel. Vocal cord vibration stops for a very brief time or does not stop at all during short closure times. Burst durations appear to be longer in spontaneous speech than in read speech. Little influence of stress is in accordance with findings in the studies on Estonian and some other languages. Vowel influences were dependent on the place of articulation. Bilabial [p] was the least affected both in allophonic variation and in durations. Velar [k] was influenced by the vowel context but it mostly occurred in whole as extensive reduction; different vowels had more effect on the allophonic variation than in the case of [p] but durations were almost unaffected. Influences on [t] mostly occurred as significant duration differences; yet, also some differences in allophonic variation occurred.
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The most widespread Estonian Christian chant is Lutheran chorale, which is based on a text of strophic verses, in which all verses can be sung with the same tune. The roots of the written tradition of the Western Christian chant (9th–10th cc.), however, are in the prose text of the Latin Bible. Nowadays a chanted vernacular prose text from the Bible or vernacular plainchant has found its way to the Lutheran repertoire. The article demonstrates how consideration of the parameters of Estonian prosody can contribute to the creation and practice of Estonian plainchant. In other words, the article describes a system of principles following which the stylistically versatile Estonian plainchant is created. The styles of vernacular plainchant are: (1) contemplative, (2) declarative, and (3) free style. The Estonian or vernacular plainchant can be defined either through the categories of linguistics or those of Christian piety. In terms of linguistics, the vernacular plainchant follows the three parameters of prosody: (1) the temporal parameter, (2) the dynamic parameter, and (3) the intonation parameter, while pronouncing the texts of the Holy Scriptures and realising as well as considering these three parameters in shaping the melodic information and bearing it in mind in performance. In terms of Christian piety, the vernacular plainchant is a monodic musical a cappella pronunciation of the unaltered prose texts of the Holy Scriptures, which is based on prayerful concentration and/or sacred conviction, and is trying to follow in every point the authority of the Word of God and consider the prosodic peculiarities of a particular language. The contemplative style is based on “switching off” the personal prosodic intonations of the text. To a certain extent the result resembles a phenomenon that is known in music performance as “recitation”. However, it differs from recitation, because there is no intention of a performer to express him- or herself through music. The result that is similar to recitation happens simply because the performer begins to say the syllables at the same height without any intention to sing. Melodic formulas are then applied to this recitation-like contemplative talking. There are two kinds of melodic formulas in Western plainchant: (1) formulas with accentual cadences, and (2) formulas with cursive cadences. Accentual cadence takes into consideration the prosodic principles of Latin as well as other Indo-European languages in which an accented syllable is usually perceived as the longest syllable of a word. This means that the accented syllables are always marked with dominant notes of a cadence. Cursive cadence, on the other hand, always applies the same amount of syllables in the cadences without any accentual considerations. Estonian prosody differs significantly from Indo-European prosody, as the accented syllable is not always the longest syllable of the word. Therefore, in Estonian formula-based plainchant a cursive principle should be preferred. While the contemplative style stands on “switching off” personal prosodic interpretation, the declarative style attempts to achieve the opposite: personal conviction in pronouncing the text should be enhanced and extracted as a melody. The free style is a further development of the declarative style, in which the composer decorates the melody according to his or her personal creativity and taste. Describing the contemplative, declarative, and free styles of Estonian plainchant showed that we are dealing with a genre of extensive possibilities, which appreciates our mother tongue, recognises the tradition from which our musical culture springs, and gives a dignified position to the core text of the Estonian language and culture – the Bible.
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For the studies of quantity degrees, words were chosen which the Dictionary of Standard Estonian (ÕS 2013) lists as being pronounced with both the second and third quantity degree. As Estonian text-to-speech synthesis relies in its determination of pronunciation on this dictionary and automatic text analysis cannot handle multiple outputs, the aim is to find out which variant is more common among language users, to give the preference to one of the pronunciation variants. This study is based on a reading experiment conducted with 50 informants (36 women and 14 men), in which each informant read 52 sentences aloud. These sentences contained 49 target words, i.e., words of variable quantity degrees; in total, the study yielded 2438 pronunciation instances to examine. Each pronunciation instance got an audio assessment made by 2 listeners. If their quantity degree assessment were conflicted (one listener gave second and another gave third quantity assessment) the third listener was then ultimate decider. There are two main questions we would like to answer. First of all, we are interested in finding out how much an auditory assessment depends on listeners and how much the estimations are changed during the evaluation. Finding answers to these questions will help us to reach the main goal of our study: to find out the main tendencies in how the words with variable quantity degrees are pronounced. Comparing the auditory assessment of the first and second listener, it turned out that of the 2438 pronunciations, the assessments of two listeners differed in 375 cases (15% of all the pronunciation instances). In case of inconsistencies, we gave the first listener the opportunity to make a new assessment. It turned out that the first estimation was changed on average in 50% of the instances. These 375 cases in which the first and second listener’s quantity degree assessments were conflicted were in the end changed by 72% of cases. This means that for all the 2438 pronunciations, the listeners changed their first assessment by an average of 12% of the cases. On the basis of the informants’ pronunciation, the words were grouped into three categories: the second quantity degree (words in which pronunciation with the second quantity degree dominated), variable quantity degree (where neither the second nor the third quantity degree accounted for more than 2/3 of all pronunciations), and the third quantity degree (words in which pronunciation with the third quantity degree dominated). Based on the auditory assessment, 20 words fell into the second quantity degree group, in which words were pronounced predominantly with the second quantity degree. These words were mullu ‘yester-year’, alles ‘only’, teisal ‘elsewhere’, ilma ‘without’, toimekas ‘expeditious’, soodus ‘favourable’, tallinlane ‘citizen of Tallinn’, andekas ‘talented’, rõõmus ‘jolly’, kirju ‘varicolored’, hilja ‘late’, võimekas ‘capable’, maitsekas ‘tasteful’, kiire ‘fast’, täiuslik ‘perfect’, võimetu ‘incapable’, augustis ‘in August’, eile ‘yesterday’, ungarlane ‘Hungarian’, politseinik ‘policeman’. Listing starts with a word which has the largest amount of second quantity degree pronunciation instances (100% of readers pronounced mullu as a word with the second quantity degree) and ends with the smallest amount of second quantity degree pronunciation instances (72% of readers pronounced politseinik as a word with the second quantity degree). The third quantity degree group contained 22 words. These words are saatanlik ‘satanic’, saatuslik ‘fateful’, peenelt ‘finely’, kuulus ‘famous’, rahvuslik ‘national’, äärmuslik ‘extreme’, looduslik ‘natural’, jaanuar ‘January’, kangelane ‘hero’, pealik ‘chief’, nooruslik ‘youthful’, haiguslik ‘diseaseful’, ahne ‘greedy’, ihne ‘penny-pinching’, kaine ‘sober’, terve ‘healthy’, kärme ‘fast’, ammu ‘erst‘, aula ‘hall’, nõiduslik ‘bewitching’, piknikuga ‘with picnic’, hirmus ‘horrible’. The variable quantity degree group contained 7 words: ilmetu ‘inexpressive’, kaitsetu ‘defenceless’, meetod ‘method’, ümbrikus ‘in envelope’, keiserlik ‘imperial’, teaduslik ‘scientific’, enne ‘before’.
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The use of large speech corpora in phonetic research depends to a great extent on the availability and quality of phonetic segmentation and transcriptions. As a rule, the best quality of segmentation is achieved by human transcribers who perform time-consuming and tedious manual work. However, tools for automatic segmentation exploiting typically HMM-based forced alignment methods have been developed for different languages. In recent years, two automatic systems as free online services have become available for Estonian: (1) the system developed at Tallinn University of Technology (https://phon.ioc.ee/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=projects:tuvastus:est-align.et), and (2) the multi-lingual tool WebMAUS (https://clarin.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/BASWebServices/). In this study we evaluate the performance of the two systems against human transcribers. The test set includes Estonian read speech produced by: (1) four L1 adult subjects, (2) six L1 adolescents, and (3) four L2 adult subjects. The reference segmentation data including 27 sentences from L1 subjects and 10 sentences from the other subjects were produced manually as Praat textgrid files with two tiers (word-level orthographic and phoneme-level SAMPA transcription); the automatic systems have produced similar textgrid files. In total, 1179 word boundaries and 5050 phone boundaries were compared. The results show that both systems performed more accurately for L1 adult speech and were less accurate in the case of adolescent and L2 speech. While the TUT system outperformed WebMAUS in L1 adult speech, then in L1 adolescents and L2 speech WebMAUS produced more accurate results. Despite the deviations in phone boundaries, the durations of vowel and consonant segments measured from automatic and manual segmentations of L1 adult speech differ only marginally. This suggest that the accuracy of both automatic systems seems to be sufficient for speech technology needs and could also be used in acoustic studies of L1 adult speech. However, both systems need improvements in order to reach the accuracy of automatic segmentation tools available for English.
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The study examines the acoustic correlates of sentence stress in Estonian. The data consists of 18 four-word sentences read aloud by nine speakers in answer to three questions eliciting different information structures. The test words include six sets of triplets of words differing minimally in quantity degree. The words occur in three different stress conditions: (i) after narrow focus (the unstressed condition); (ii) as the nuclear accented word in a broad focus sentence (the stressed condition); and (iii) as an emphatically accented narrow focus (used for the purposes of normalisation). The test word is always the third word in the four-word sentence in order to avoid interferences from boundary signals. The potential correlates under study are the following: (i) the F0 range and peak height of the test word, measured in the test words with a H*L pitch accent respectively as the difference between the F0 maximum of the stressed syllable and the F0 minimum of the unstressed syllable, and as the difference from the mean F0 maximum of the test word in the three stress conditions produced by a speaker; (ii) the duration of the test word in the different stress conditions, measured as the difference from the mean duration of the test word in all three conditions; (iii) the intensity range and the maximal intensity level of the test word; (iv) the values of the F1 and F2 formants as indicators of vowel quality; and (v) the spectral emphasis of the stressed syllable of the test words. The above values were analysed separately for the three quantity degrees in order to determine a potential effect of the prosodic structure of the word on the acoustic realisation of sentence stress. The data was statistically analysed with the Systat software package. The classification power of the different parameters was determined, using linear discriminant analysis. The strongest correlate of sentence stress turned out to be F0, as was expected, given that sentence stress is phonologically realised as a pitch accent. From the two F0 values, the peak height was the stronger one, with a classification power of 89%, F0 range permitting to classify correctly 76% of the data. Almost equally strong correlates as the F0 range were the duration and intensity level, classifying correctly respectively 75% and 73% of the data. Vowel quality and spectral emphasis did not correlate significantly with sentence stress. The results also revealed an effect of lexical prosody on the acoustic realisation of sentence stress: the lengthening and the rise of the intensity level were the largest in the stressed words of the third (overlong) quantity degree.
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The material that the article is based on is comprised of phraseologisms (in all 20,749) included in the electronic base dictionary of Estonian idiomatic expressions. The theoretical basis is the idea that in case a linguistic unit – be it a word in its literal meaning, a phrase, or a sentence – is understood metaphorically, the metaphor is related to the literal meaning on the basis of a relationship or certain rules. This function is usually fulfilled by a trope. The article focuses on the ontological nature of analysing figurative words in Estonian phraseologisms. For this purpose, the author presents the ontological characterisation of a hundred most frequent figurative words in Estonian phraseologisms, and, based on this, makes the following conclusions about Estonian phraseology: 1) The source of the image is related to Estonians’ everyday life – the top hundred of figurative words cover the human sphere and zoology; 2) A remarkable number of phraseologisms are based on lexemes covering everyday domains, which characterise our beliefs, understandings, and everyday activities – the things needed for survival are essential; 3) Zipf’s law applies – there is a plethora of figurative words with extremely low frequency of occurrence (in one or two expressions), and a very small number of figurative words with extremely high frequency of occurrence (in a hundred or more expressions); 4) By its nature, Estonian phraseology is very commonplace and vernacular. One of the reasons for this is probably that the researched archival material mainly originates from oral speech notations.
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Phrasemes that represent a short folklore genre are found in all languages. They can be used to enrich both the spoken and written language, and the ability to use them shows a skilful mastery of the language. The term kõnekäänd [speech + turn > turn of phrase], which marks instances of figurative language, first appeared in Estonian a couple of centuries ago. The present article explores written Estonian sources (dictionaries, grammars, textbooks, handbooks, and monographs, but also correspondence and handwritten collections) from the 17th century up to the 1920s, to find out how this term evolved and why it came into use. In so doing, some insights into German terms are also offered to explain the influence other languages had on the written language that was still developing back then.
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During the 17th and 18th centuries, Estonian inflection was described in the traditional framework of Latin grammar. Grammars still differed from one another. For example, Johann Gutslaff observed that the case forms which were traditionally included in the Latinized case paradigm and other Estonian word forms were actually formed the same way. Johann Hornung’s grammar started a new era by offering a more vernacular-based description of Estonian inflection than in previous grammars. An active search for alternative ways to describe Estonian inflection took place in the first half of the 19th century. Both verbal and nominal paradigms received novel interpretations, and mutation was for the first time treated systematically. The nature of case and the contents of the case paradigm were the most popular topics. The first complete overview of the Estonian inflectional system which followed the new ideas was compiled by Eduard Ahrens. In the second half of the 19th century, the thorough descriptive grammar by Ferdinand Johann Wiedemann and the first grammars in the Estonian language were published. The first disciplines of emerging Estonian linguistics, historical linguistics and dialectology evolved during the 1920s–1930s under the leadership of Andrus Saareste, Julius Mägiste and others. The 1940s–1950s were shadowed by war and the beginning of the Soviet occupation. Linguistic research was neither particularly productive nor novel, and the fields and methods remained largely the same as before. Arnold Kask began his thorough studies on the history of literary Estonian, which in time developed into a fruitful research discipline under his influence. The 1960s–1990s was a period characterized by intensive attention to inflection theory. First, Estonian word forms were described using the internationally well-known IA and IP models. Then, Ülle Viks, Toomas Help, Henn Saari and Martin Ehala all developed their own morphological models. Research was influenced by novel methods and insights, e.g. the theory of natural morphology and the center-periphery view of linguistic phenomena. Huno Rätsep suggested a new interpretation of Estonian moods, giving evidentiality a distinctive role. Toomas Help and Joel Nevis examined some case morphemes as clitics instead of the traditional interpretation as case affixes. A thorough descriptive grammar was compiled (1993-1995). Its inflection chapter, authored by Kristiina Ross, differed radically from the previous grammars and relied on the morphological classification of Ülle Viks and the model of regular and irregular morphology by Toomas Help. Some new disciplines emerged: first-language acquisition, the study of colloquial language and computational linguistics. The research of Mati Hint, in particular, revealed major systematic differences between formal and colloquial inflection. Traditional disciplines flourished as well. Among other works, many important general treatments were published: a history of the noun paradigm by Huno Rätsep, a history of literary Estonian by Arnold Kask, a systematic overview of contemporary inflection by Jaak Peebo and comprehensive overviews of several Estonian dialects. The most important theoretical works of the new millennium include the descriptions of Estonian verb and noun inflection using the WP model by James Blevins. Studies on colloquial Estonian have revealed some ongoing changes in morphological paradigms. Second-language acquisition and the study of language disorders have developed into full-fledged research areas. Of the existent disciplines, first-language acquisition, dialectology, the history of literary Estonian and research on colloquial Estonian have been productive. Diachronic inflection, on the other hand, has received less attention than before. Recently, research on morphosyntax has prevailed over the study of inflection.
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The language-specific rules for expressing grammatical aspect in Estonian by the use of case forms of grammatical object were first described by Eduard Ahrens (1803–1863) in his “Grammatik der Ehstnischen Sprache Revalschen Dialektes” (1853). In the Estonian language the perfective aspect is expressed by the nominative and genitive cases of the object, and imperfective aspect by the partitive case of the object. During the last 150 years since Ahrens’s grammar, and later a grammar by Ferdinand Johann Wiedemann (“Grammatik der Ehstnischen Sprache ...”, 1875) the rules covering the usage of these cases for expressing aspect have been elaborated into a detailed syntactic theory. Nowadays, however, the situation is gradually changing: under the influence of Indo-European languages the partitive case seems to occupy more and more the role of Indo-European accusative as a common case for grammatical object, leaving aside and neutralizing the expression of aspect.
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This paper compares the morphosyntactic usage patterns of Estonian belletristic language in the 1890s and 1990s. A program called Cluster Catcher (developed at the Tallinn University) is applied to find similar n-grams, i.e. sequences of words, on the basis of morphological and syntactic tags, taking into account the frequency of use. The appropriateness of this statistics-based program has been proven previously and the results have opened a new view to the usage-based grammar of Estonian. In this case, trigrams are grouped into morphological clusters (part of speech sequences) which are, in turn, classified into morphological classes based on the part of speech of their first component, and divided into subclasses based on the first and final component, so that the middle component varies. Remarkable statistical shifts that have taken place during the period are revealed in this corpus-driven research. Based on the distribution of morphological classes, I put forward hypotheses about possible diachronic changes. After that, step by step I find evidence on the level of subclasses, clusters and trigrams. It can be suggested that analyticity has been on the rise in Estonian (formation of multi-word units in relation to the widening of patterns consisting of adverbs by the 1990s). Open and closed parts of speech have different functional adeptness and constraints in texts (e.g. two closed parts of speech – conjunction and adposition – have differences in usage; while the usage of conjuctions is widening thanks to the rise of coordinative-correlative words, the usage of adpositsions is declining due to the decreasing number of adpositions and narrowing of functions). Background factors, such as text creation (type of text, coherence, wholeness of text, pragmatics) and also the target of language reform towards more expressive Estonian, can be taken into consideration.
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Linking Estonian linguistic proficiency to reference levels of the CEFR and different educational stages does not rely on research but is based on deep-rooted perceptions. More veracious data can be obtained by comparing a native speaker’s language usage patterns to morphological and lexical preferences characteristic to speakers of every language level. For this purpose, tools for automatic text processing (which are mainly created on the basis of English) and different techniques for data analysis are needed. The article introduces an original computer program called Cluster Catcher that has been developed in the Tallinn University for finding usage patterns from Estonian written language texts.
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The article is an attempt at analyzing the clothes produced by Christian clothing stores, mainly T-shirts, but also to—a lesser degree—sweatshirts, shirts, hats, dresses, etc. T-shirt manufacturers refers on the one hand to the Holy Scriptures, prayers fragments, papal sermons, vocations and greetings of religious orders and assemblies, and on the other hand to the language characteristic for youth subcultures, colloquial language, Anglicism and popular culture.
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We investigate the digital vitality of Uralic languages and dialects, and discuss how existing approaches to language revitalization relate to this model.
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The aim of this paper is to introduce my efforts to create server-sided (i.e., platform independent web-based, from a user’s perspective) automatic transcription and transliteration software for Uralic and non-Uralic languages of Russia. For ten literary standards – Meadow Mari, Hill Mari, Komi, Udmurt, Erzya, Moksha, Russian, Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash – an operational interface can be found at transcribe.mari-language.com and the source code at source.mari-language.com, published under a Creative Commons license. This paper details many of the fine aspects of writing systems used for (Meadow) Mari that I had to take into consideration when creating transcription mechanisms for that language.
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Profesor Janusz Bańczerowski, były kierownik Katedry Filologii Polskiej oraz były dyrektor Instytutu Filologii Słowiańskiej i Bałtyckiej na Budapeszteńskim Uniwersytecie im. Loranda Eotvosa, 2 stycznia 2011 r. ukończy siedemdziesiąt lat. Składający jubilatowi życzenia nie jest w łatwej sytuacji, chociażby przez wzgląd na gatunek literacki. Myślę, że moim zadaniem nie jest przedstawianie osiągnięć naukowych Pana Profesora, wszak poza Węgrami, osoba Pana Profesora jest dobrze znana i doceniana w całej Europie. Wymownym tego dowodem, poza licznymi zagranicznymi konferencjami i wykładami, setkami naukowych publikacji, jest blisko dwa tysiące odwołań do prac Pana Profesora. W tych oficjalnych, a zarazem niepozbawionych emocjonalnego zabarwienia życzeniach, chciałbym wyróżnić kilka cech charakteryzujących osobowość Jubilata oraz kilka elementów intelektualnego podłoża jego prac naukowych.
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