« Le crime, phénomène social normal ». Logique argumentative vs logique du bon sens commun

Author(s): Mihaela Niculae / Language(s): French Issue: 6/2017

In order to prove that logical argumentation and the argumentation of the common sense have two different starting points, and therefore they are completely different one from another, we are going to analyze some fragments from Émile Durkheim’s book Les règles de la methode sociologique and face the two opposed voices that can be heard throughout his book: the voice of Durkheim (associated to the voice of the scientist) and the voice of the ordinary man (revealing the point of view of the common sense). Following the Theory of Semantic Blocks, we are going to show that what at first came as a complete nonsense, more precisely, what seemed to be a paradox in the eyes of the ordinary man, reveals to obey in the end the rules of a scientific approach and thus covers the shape of a pseudo-paradox. Thereby, the article aims to show that the scientist’s and the common man’s viewpoint cannot be the same when it comes to the apprehension of the facts of the world. While the mindset of the scientist lacks barriers and prejudices, the ordinary man’s plays the role of a wall preventing him from seeing the world otherwise than through the common beliefs, namely the stereotypes.

THE SOGDIAN HORSEMAN: VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF A HUNTING SCENE IN PRE-MODERN CENTRAL ASIA AND IRAN

Author(s): Marina Apaydin / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2016

Silver dishes from pre-modern Near East are not unique. Yet, their iconography is sometimes puzzling and may be easily misinterpreted. In this paper, I analyze the reasons for such misinterpretation drawing upon western art historian methodologies and Russian theories of iconology and suggest a probabilistic approach to deconstruction, interpretation and attribution of the elements of the image to a particular style, period, and place. The silver dish to which this analysis is applied came from the crossroads of Near Eastern cultures and represents a hunting scene. I suggest that unlike in mathematics, the simplest explanation is not always the best. The analysis of an art object should take into consideration the long and arduous road leading to its inception: the multitude of the external influences exerted on the creator, and the observer, of the art piece and their corresponding context.

Иван Георгов - предтеча на психолингвистиката в България

Author(s): Yuliana Stoyanova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2022

The contributions of Ivan Georgiov – philosopher, pedagogue, linguist and public figure to Bulgaria are multifaceted. The aim of this paper is to highlight Ivan Georhov’s contributions to the developmental psycholinguistics: his studies of the early acquisition of Bulgarian in comparison to other Slavic and Indo-European languages (German, French, English, Italian) are still actual. He described the individual differences in language acquisition decades before that scientific paradigm has been set up. He discussed the origin of the words for father and mother in various languages, relating them to the pre-linguistic stage of babbling. He gave a detailed description of the phonological processes in early mastering of /r/ by children acquiring Slavic vs. non-Slavic languages.

За кирилицата като шрифт на Балканите през XV–XVI век

Author(s): Mariyana Tsibranska-Kostova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2023

The author explores the following issues: the differing graphical systems of the early print Cyrillic fonts and their role in establishing common identity through achieving cultural unity in graphical diversity. The paper provides conclusions about the types of orthographic systems (the Tarnovo two-nasal system and the Raška and Resava systems); the graphical inventory of individual editions accor-ding to selected differential features; the areal and cultural specifics of the studied editions. The author argues that the early print Cyrillic fonts functioned as a sign and information system and a cultural phenomenon that upheld tradition and rein-forced its literary prestige.

Новооткрит възрожденски писмен паметник с гръцко писмо от Централните Родопи

Author(s): Georgi Mitrinov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2023

The article deals with the recently discovered Ustovski sbornik, a written monu-ment from the Central Rhodope region. The collection was compiled and owned by Kiryak Byalkovski, a prominent figure in the Central Rhodopes. The texts included in the collection are written in the local Rhodope dialect using the Greek alphabet. In addition, they contain features of South-western Bulgarian dialects, as well as vocabulary distinctive of Church Slavonic. The collection comprises sections of Damaskin sermons and gospel texts, among others. The article presents a set of guidelines for exploring the graphical, grammatical and lexical characteristics of this manuscript as part of the Central Rhodope literary tradition of the Bulgarian National Revival period.

Диахронен аспект на българската антропонимна система през XIX в. Езикови особености. Тенденции

Author(s): Tatyana Braga / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2023

The article presents results of a study of the historical aspects of Bulgarian anthro-ponymy obtained as part of a postdoctoral project. The study is based on 19th-century archival materials that have been introduced into scientific circulation only recently. It reveals the unique features of the formation of the anthroponymy char-acteristic of a Bulgarian community outside Bulgaria’s ethnic territory. The study presents linguistic and statistical data on 19th-century Bulgarian personal names, highlighting the changes in the personal name system of the settlers in Tabak (South Bessarabia) that took place under polylinguistic influence.

Съществителните имена от общ род в Найден-Геровия речник

Author(s): Vanina Sumrova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2023

The article explores the representation of common gender nouns in Nayden Gerov’s dictionary. The author outlines the structure of the dictionary entry and its characteristics, indicating the types of definitions employed. The analysis shows that the first multi-volume dictionary in Bulgarian lexicography offers a correct grammatical description and an accurate interpretation of the semantics of the nouns under consideration.

Граматикализация и синтаксис. Един когнитивен прочит

Author(s): Mariana Georgieva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

The article offers a cognitive reading of the pronouns in view of their categorical nature. Their cognitive reading offers an interesting slice of grammaticalization as a dialectical relationship between morphology and syntax. A relevant criterion for the syntactic behavior of this ambivalence is cognitive potency.

Focussing and Levelling in the Auckland Voices Project

Author(s): Miriam Meyerhoff,Elaine Ballard,Catherine Watson,Alexandra Birchfield / Language(s): English Issue: 6S/2023

Levelling and focussing are well-documented processes, central to the emergence of new dialects, including to the emergence of New Zealand English as a distinct variety in the last hundred and fifty years. We draw on recent recordings from three areas in Auckland to examine the extent to which levelling and focussing continue to be relevant today. Most work on NZ English as a new dialect has concentrated on phonology; we extend the analysis to syntax. We consider the structure of relative clauses used in communities which have very different demographic profiles and histories of immigration. We find evidence that levelling and focussing continue to underpin the development of post-colonial English in New Zealand. Our data suggests that speakers draw on linguistically motivated solutions to the choice among variants when focussing occurs.

Historical Folk Sociolinguistics

Author(s): Dennis R. Preston / Language(s): English Issue: 6S/2023

This paper shows how the canonical definition of historical sociolinguistics as the study of language use fails to consider independent evidence for language attitudes, beliefs, and ideologies (i.e., language regard). One approach to avoiding this limited understanding of use might lie in a historical folk sociolinguistics, in which particular attention is paid to the nonasserted (i.e., indirect, presuppositional, implicational, perlocutionary) meanings, described in Preston (2004) as “metalanguage 3.” Interactions in drama are first justified as “good data,” and analyses of such nonasserted elements of utterances show that they approach both the social psychological goal of uncovering implicit language regard behaviors and the variationist goal of determining the subjective correlates of variation and change.

Inteligencja na zgliszczach ojczyzny”. Model badawczy systemu dla konserwatywnego dyskursu o transformacji systemowej w Rosji w latach 90. XX wieku

Author(s): Małgorzata Abassy / Language(s): Polish Issue: 7/2023

The analysis of the discourse of systemic transformation in the 90s of the twentieth century in Russia was carried out on the basis of the source text entitled Intelligence on the ruins of the homeland (1996) by the conservative publicist Sergei Kara-Murza. The analysis began with the clarification of the concept of the system, its component parts, the mechanism of maintaining functional balance and the time frame of transformation. The conclusions of the analysis allowed us to build the model of the system. The model enables a researcher to trace the inconsistencies that consist in loosening the relationship between the fundamental parts of a system – values. The words that are characterized by ambivalence made the second layer of systemic analysis. The question of their semantics reveals the direction of transformation of the system – towards an increase in functional balance or towards its disturbance. The question about the role of intelligence boils down to its competence in recognizing the nuances of meaning and building such models of the system that will show the potential dangers of clashing values before the postulates are implemented in practice. In this aspect, the system model, on the basis of which the course of the system transformation can be forecasted, has a diagnostic and prognostic functions.

Do Blind People Need Gestures to Communicate Effectively?

Author(s): Jolanta Sak-Wernicka / Language(s): English Issue: 10S/2023

Gestures are known to play an important role in communication, but to this day it is still not clear what impact visual impairment has on gesture production. The main objective of this article is to investigate: (1) whether the lack of vision reduces (or completely blocks) gesture production in blind individuals, and (2) whether this reduction in (or lack of) gestures has an effect on their abilities to communicate. To address this issue, we performed an experiment in which congenitally blind and sighted people were compared on the number and types of gestures they produced when playing the word-guessing game TABOO. The results obtained confirm that, compared to people who are sighted, blind individuals produce significantly fewer gestures when they communicate. This, however, does not have any negative impact on how effective they are in conveying their messages. The analyses also show that gestures play different roles for blind and sighted people.

Психолингвистично изследване на „теорията на съзнанието“ при турски деца билингви

Author(s): Hristo Kyuchukov / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 2/2023

This article presents the results of a study of bilingual Turkish preschool children living in Berlin, Germany. The study was conducted among two groups of children between 4 and 6 years of age (18 in total) in kindergarten with the aim of examining the extent to which the mother tongue (L1) and the second language (L2) are a factor in understanding the theory of mind. The children were offered the classical tests for the theory of mind, as well as language tests related to the comprehension of interrogative sentences, containing a verb that shows a mental state, and to the comprehension and production of vocabulary in native Turkish and German as a second language for them. The results show that vocabulary is not an important factor, and that the mastery of interrogative sentences is a factor that helps understand the theory of mind. The results obtained were analyzed statistically with the t-test.

Връзката между съзнанието и езика – изследване на влиянието на езиковата среда върху педагогиката

Author(s): Svetoslav Berchev / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 2/2023

The relationship between language and thinking has significant implications for pedagogy. Understanding how language shapes cognition can determine teaching practices and curriculum development in multilingual educational settings. Educators can tailor instruction to align with the linguistic and cognitive frameworks of the target language, using language-specific teaching materials and strategies. By recognizing language-specific conceptual categories and metaphors, they can promote a deeper conceptual understanding. In multilingual classrooms, teachers can foster an inclusive learning environment that values linguistic diversity, promoting cross-linguistic interactions and cognitive flexibility. Developing students’ metalinguistic awareness helps them reflect on how language shapes their thinking. Inclusive pedagogical approaches accommodate diverse linguistic and cognitive styles, incorporating students’ preferred languages, promoting multicultural perspectives, and creating an inclusive classroom environment. By incorporating an awareness of how language shapes thinking, educators can create more effective and culturally responsive learning experiences, leading to enhanced engagement, deeper understanding, and inclusivity in education.

Užívání překladových technik v rámci semináře Rusko-česká překladová cvičení

Author(s): Tamara Russkina / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2023

The article draws upon the author’s research into the role of translation and interpreting in foreign language pedagogy, offering examples of practical exercises that have proved successful in courses of Czech as a foreign language. The article presents translation and interpreting as effective tools in foreign language pedagogy which develop the students’ communicative and linguistic competence in both the target language and the source language.

Щрихи от композитното словообразуване в банатските преводи на Новия завет

Author(s): Mariyana Tsibranska-Kostova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 6/2023

The purpose of this article is to present one of many possible research aspects in the New Testament translations of palćensći jazić, banátsći balgarsći jazić. There is an old translation from the end of the 19th century and a new one from 1998. The historical circumstances and influences, as well as the relationship between the two translations, remain the subject of a complete separate study. Despite the reduced number of examples in the chosen field of compound word formation, the cultural distinctiveness of the Banat translations of the New Testament is demonstrated. They are not a narrowly dialectal phenomenon, but a supradialectal and linguocultural one. They have both common features and significant differences, which reflect the processes of the intra-linguistic dynamics of the written regional form of the Bulgarian language in the Banat region. They should be studied in a comparative perspective with other representatives of the New Bulgarian spoken language tradition of the Bible. The layers of the Bulgarian dialect language; the influence of Romanian, Hungarian, German, and Croatian; the international vocabulary of Greek and Latin; the Old Bulgarian literary tradition appear in both translations.

Crisis and Renaissance: The Historian, the Painter and the Priest in the “Great upheaval” of the Age

Author(s): Vladimir Nikolaev Gradev / Language(s): English Issue: 51/2023

Are We Still at War with the Other: Media Language Now and Then on Roma, Gypsies and Travellers

Author(s): Desislava Cheshmedzhieva-Stoycheva / Language(s): English Issue: 28/2023

The focus of the paper is upon a comparison of the language media in Bulgaria and the UK when talking about ethnic minorities, and more specifically on Roma in Bulgaria and Gypsies and Travellers in the UK. Applying the sociocognitivist approach within the Critical discourse studies (van Dijk 2016), I revisit one of the most frequent metaphors, i.e. the one related to WAR, used by the media at the beginning of the century (2001-2005) and in 2020-2022. The reason to select that particular device is the fact that metaphors reflect thinking patterns and emotions that people share and are conducive to the establishment of a generalized image of various phenomena, and, in this particular case, of an ethnic group. At the same time, I hypothesize that the pandemic would probably take media attention away from ethnic minorities and thus coverage of the groups would be scantier and the language, in case there are articles on Roma and Gypsies and Travellers, more neutral and void of metaphors. The corpus for the analysis at hand comprises some of the most popular dailies circulated online in Bulgaria and the UK. The analysis has shown that despite the time difference and the pandemic, the attitude and the language the Bulgarian and the British media use in their presentations of this ethnic group in particular has not changed significantly and has not been affected significantly by Covid-19.

Modality in Sustainability Discourse by Harrods and Liberty: Analysing British Cultural Icons’ Discursive Practices

Author(s): Oleksandr Kapranov / Language(s): English Issue: 28/2023

The article presents and discusses a mixed-method study whose aim is to find out how Harrods and Liberty, two luxury department stores in London (the United Kingdom) that are referred to as British cultural icons (visitbritain.com 2023), use modality that is expressed by modal verbs (e.g., can) in their discourse on sustainability. Methodologically, the study is based upon the literature (Aiezza 2015; Bu et al. 2020; Garzone & Catenaccio 2022; Kranich & Bicsar 2012), which argues that modal verbs play a number of important pragmatic roles in corporate discourse. Following the literature, it is hypothesised in the study that modal verbs in sustainability discourses by Harrods and Liberty are employed in a pragmatically similar manner. In order to verify the hypothesis, a corpus of Harrods’ and Liberty’s sustainability discourses is collected and analysed quantitatively in the computer program AntConc (Anthony 2022) to compute the frequency of the occurrence of modal verbs. Thereafter, the most frequent modal verbs in the corpus are examined qualitatively to establish their pragmatic roles in Harrods’ and Liberty’s sustainability discourses. The findings indicate that these discourses make use of the modal verbs will and can as boosters that contribute to a positive corporate image-building.

From “Burning Bridges” to Bridging Cultural Gaps: Water and Fire Idioms in English and Romanian

Author(s): Alexandra Stan / Language(s): English Issue: 28/2023

The relation between culture and language can offer important information to the language learner. In fact, one way to understand a culture is through its language. Teachers of English as a foreign language (ought to) provide knowledge of the culture along with the mandatory curriculum items as a means to support students in bridging any cultural gaps. This paper aims to analyze English water and fire idiomatic expressions by describing their meanings and origins and identifying their Romanian equivalents. The research starts with a theoretical overview of the definitions and classifications of idiomatic expressions in the specialized literature, followed by the contrastive analysis of twenty English idioms functioning as verbs. More specifically, the description of their meanings and origins is provided, as well as the Romanian counterparts, and where possible, the origins of the translated items. The last part of the paper draws some conclusions on the significance and practical teaching implications of this analysis.