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This article is aimed at establishing the place of exoticisms against the spectrum of other loan words. We consider increased language and cultural contacts, intensified in recent years. Additionally, we focus on the typology of loan words, taking into account their degree of assimilation to the rules of the recipient language. We define exoticisms as unassimilated loan words, whose main aim is to re-create various national features and name unknown cultural phenomena. The domination of cultural traits in the semantic structure of exoticisms (which constitutes the hallmark of this lexical group) is the basis of the proposed relation between the analyzed loan words and the so-called words-realities. Moreover, we put stress on the particular spheres of life in which exoticisms are used, as well as on their inner differentiation, connected with the nativization processes affecting the language.
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In the second half of the last century the English term black hole was borrowed into Polish and Russian. Soon, secondary meanings began to appear predominantly in journalistic texts. They have been partially recorded in linguistic dictionaries. The aim of this paper is to show the secondary meanings of the phrase czarna dziura / чернаядыра listed in dictionaries as well as those present only in Polish and Russian texts.
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Multiple names can be seen as the norm rather than as an exception in the context of post-national conceptions of history. It can hardly be seen as a peculiarity that when two different languages are in contact, the relevant systems of proper names influence each other. It is less common, at least in Central Europe, that such contacts involve three languages, especially when these influences are not only one-sided, but also mutual.This is the case in the eastern regions of Lower and Upper Lusatia, where, as in other areas of German-Slavonic contact, numerous Slavonic geographical names have been adopted in German linguistic usage. Here, on the eastern periphery of the Sorbian language area, the opposite case, the borrowing of German name formations by Sorbian, can be easily observed, to a certain degree. Added to this, the collection of Sorbian names in the 19th century, coinciding with the Sorbian cultural renaissance, had the aim of providing quasi-official name formations for Sorbian linguistic practice. It was inevitable that on the periphery of the Sorbian language area at that time this process led to reconstructions, which can be described as conversions of German place names into a Sorbian form. After the transition of these areas to the east of the River Neisse to Poland after 1945 the process of converting these place names into Polish began. Although this process was completed quickly, the creation of new names was not done in an arbitrary fashion. There was rather extensive recourse to older traditions, in particular to the store of Sorbian names. The three toponymies of the region are therefore linked to each other through a variety of processes. This is described in detail in the article; all the place names of the eastern region are subdivided and then statistically evaluated. The main focus lies on the modern processes of Sorbianization and Polonization, which have until now been given less attention.
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English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is a demanding field for its practitioners regarding its methodology, pedagogy, didactics, for numerous factors, primarily, it having a paradoxical position within the field of English language teaching due to at once its undeniable presence and relevance but rare academia institutional establishment, and still not having a consolidated relevant theoretical basis. Practice of teaching ESP involves dealing with real life issues of how to teach a group of students who need this instruction for clearly pre-determined reasons, and therefore, what approach to use, which material, grammatical units, and alike. Stemming from actual teaching experiences, there appear valuable insights, opinions, research results of ESP practitioners as formulated and presented in the form of journal articles, which even more than in other fields become primary sources of familiarizing with current and emergent approaches in ESP didactics. As an Editor-in-Chief of an ESP scientific journal, the author presents discernible, most prominent tendencies in ESP methodology, pedagogy, didactics worldwide over, which summarize current theoretical and practical basis of this form of language teaching and intercultural communication.
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Fierce competition of student admission to strong reputation higher education institutions as well as getting employment in respected companies has built the need to profile potential candidates and select those that best meet one's requirements. Our research aimed to predict students' success potential, i.e. grades achieved in their English for Specific Purposes courses. Total of 292 students studying at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Information Technology Osijek, Croatia and 150 students studying at the Faculty of Material Science and Technology in Trnava, Slovakia voluntarily participated in the research by submitting their short biographies. The biographies were analyzed with the software for computational analysis (LIWC) whose output, in the form of raw numbers, was entered in an application specifically designed for this purpose. Based on the input data, the application calculated students' grades in the aforementioned courses which were later compared to the students' actual grades. The research has proven the application's high efficiency since it correctly predicted students' grades in 75% of the cases and in additional 12%, the grades were approximately predicted, i.e. the predicted grade was one grade higher/lower than the actual grade.
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In Croatia, early exposure to English is enabled through early language learning programs as well as the media. The media plays an important role in incidental language learning. This, along with the fact that daily exposure to English is measured in hours, indicates that its status as a foreign language is changing, which offers a unique opportunity to investigate the relationship between language exposure, level of proficiency and lexical access. The main goal of this study is to explore lexical access in Croatian speakers of English, with different levels of proficiency. The investigation consisted of a questionnaire on language use and exposure, proficiency test and an experiment in which cross–language priming was combined with a lexical decision task. The experiment explored whether priming effect would occur in two conditions: associative and semantic relatedness and translation equivalence, in both language directions. Semantic relationship between words elicits shorter reaction time, suggesting that sharing similar meaning speeds up the recognition process in words from two languages. Even stronger effect was observed in the case of translation equivalents. Surprisingly, proficiency level was not significant. The results are discussed in the light of the Revised Hierarchical Model and the Bilingual Interactive Activation Model +.
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Morphological doubletism refers to a phenomenon whereby two (or more) forms of the same lexeme have the same grammatical meaning (e.g. leapt/leaped, cactuses/cacti). Inspired by a lack of a linguistic resource where examples of specific doublet forms in the Croatian language could be found, the authors of this paper launched the project of creating a database whose ultimate goal is to create a list of grammatical categories in which morphological doubletism occurs and a list of lexemes which appear with doublet forms, as confirmed by tokens of the respective forms retrieved from Croatian language sources (computer corpora, lexicographic sources, literature and other relevant materials). The primary aim is to create an easily accessible and searchable resource that would enhance the research of morphological doubletism in Croatian and that the Croatian scientific community would be able to access for free. Each token would be accompanied by information regarding the work it occurs in, the year the work was created, the author of the work, his/her geographic areal, type of text and the relevant morphological labels. These data can be used to trace the phenomenon from the point of its entry into the language through all changes up to its present–day status, determine the distribution of individual forms in the modern language and ultimately determine the role of morphological doublets in the language system. The database can contribute to providing more precise descriptions of the language, which mostly disregard the phenomenon in question.
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The study examines macro- and microstructural characteristics of narrative production in Lithuanian as the first language of a group of Lithuanian-English sequential young (mean age 6;1) bilinguals (n = 12) living in the UK; the control group of monolingual Lithuanian children (n = 12) residing in Lithuania was tested as well. Monolingual children demonstrated greater vocabulary diversity and used a wider range of syntactic devices to create story cohesion than the bilinguals, although general story length (words, utterances, communication units) was higher in the bilingual group. The results point to specific aspects of language that may be difficult for children to acquire without formal education in Lithuanian. We speculate that the advantage in story length for bilingual speakers might be attributed to a greater emphasis on oral narratives within the UK educational system.
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For automatic processing of large electronic corpora, different language analysis tools and statistical methods are applied, the choice and combination of which depend on the language, the object and goals of study. In this article, we introduce an integrated software tool Klastrileidja (Cluster Catcher), which has been developed for finding language use patterns, and we give an overview of the study results obtained, using linguistic cluster analysis. Te purpose is to explain the possibilities that this method offers for natural language processing, exploring Estonian and learner language use as well as for pedagogical needs.
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Te focus of this paper is on Swedish influence on bilingual adolescents’ Finnish in informal group and pair conversations in Haparanda and Stockholm. Te theoretical framework is found in the fled of language contact research, especially earlier cross-linguistic influence studies. Te primary data was video- and audio-recorded in 2014–2017 from bilingual adolescents at three junior high schools in Haparanda and the secondary data was collected in 2015–2016 at two Swedish-Finnish junior high schools in Stockholm. All the recordings were made outside lesson times. Te analysis of the collected conversation data is qualitative and contrastive. Our earlier studies have shown that most of the embedded Swedish nouns and verbs in code-switching were adapted to the Finnish morphological system and to Finnish syntax, and the words were integrated into the Finnish grammatical system by declination, infection and conjugation. Only adjectives and adverbs were uninterested into the Finnish grammar. Nevertheless, Swedish words were not incorporated into the Finnish phonological frame in the data from Haparanda and Stockholm. Te results of this study show that Swedish influence on the bilingual adolescents’ Finnish takes place mainly in the lexicon and semantics. In addition to code-switching and borrowing, the semantic influence of Swedish on Finnish was shown in forms with Swedish idiomatic content owing to literal translations. Te corpus of conversations contains semantic influence from Swedish words with two Finnish counterparts. In those cases, a shift of meaning occurs during which the one Finnish word additionally takes on the semantic content of the other word (semantic extension). Overall, the adolescents’ spoken Finnish in Haparanda and Stockholm displays very little syntactic influence from Swedish shown in non-standard and incorrect forms in their informal conversations in Finnish. In sum, cross-linguistic influence is a complex phenomenon and bilinguals’ language repertoire is not made up of two distinct and autonomous languages that could be linearly and separately acquired and used.
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Our article deals with the development of geographical terms in Estonia and in Finland during the 1920’s. This period is especially interesting because the language of instruction in the respective countries changed to Estonian and to Finnish at roughly the same time. Te development of scientific terminology in different fields was started on both sides at the same time as well. Te Finnish geographer Johannes Gabriel Granö went to Tartu in 1919 to establish a Department of Geography at the University of Tartu. He was the first person to teach geography in Estonian and he needed a vast amount of professional terminology. Previously the teaching languages were German and Russian. During his short stay (3 years), J. G. Granö started developing geographical terminology in Estonian. At the same time, he also made efforts to consolidate the use of new scientific terminology. J. G. Granö established the committee of geographic terminology at Tartu University, but he never published any research in Estonian. Te results of J. G. Granö’s work can be found in the different areal studies of Estonia. Te main editors of these books were J. G. Granö’s students. Te study of the development of Estonian scientific terminology postulates that nearly all new scientific terms were invented by J. V. Veski. We assume that his role was in many areas primarily consulting, not inventing. Many of J. G. Granö’s invented terms are nowadays very common, such as ürgorg, voor, and vallseljak; even many Estonian place names (Soomaa, Lahemaa, Vooremaa) were likely invented by J. G. Granö. Back in Finland, J. G. Granö continued his work on geographical terminology in Finnish. His main theoretical study, Pure Geography (1930), brings together the theoretical basis which was developed in Estonia and practical work done in Finland. J. G. Granö highlighted the importance of doing science in national languages and reporting results in international languages.
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This article investigates the relationship between three variants of the active past participle in Border Karelian dialects, using statistical methods. Border Karelia is the name used for the easternmost corner of pre-war Finland, where the Karelian language was spoken. After World War II, as this region was annexed to the Soviet Union, its inhabitants were resettled in other parts of Finland; most Karelian speakers living in Finland nowadays are Border Karelian evacuees or their descendants. So far, Border Karelian dialects have not been extensively researched, but there is a Corpus of Border Karelia (RajaKarjalan korpus) based on dialect interviews conducted in the 1960s and 70s. Te data for this study comes from this corpus. Participle variation is one of the examples of morphological variation and language contact. Te so-called essive participle in -nna (sano-nna ‘said’), historically an essive case form of the Finnic NUT participle, is characteristic of the Finnish East Savo dialects, but it also appears in Border Karelian. According to Larjavaara’s hypothesis (1995) the essive participle evolved from the older Karelian variants n or nUn (sano-n ~ sano-n-na ‘said’, näh-nyn ~ näh-nyn-nä ‘seen’). These two other frequent participle variants in -n and -nUn are typical of the Karelian Proper varieties of the Karelian language. Te data used in this study consists of 482 tokens of participles; of these, 190 are essive participles, 159 are of the n type, and 133 of the nUn type. In this study, the correlations between morpheme variants and morph syntactic factors as well as the territorial distribution of these variants in Border Karelian dialects were analyzed. The study reveals that different variants of the past participle favor different morph syntactic contexts. The essive participle is typical of Ilomantsi in the westernmost Border Karelian area, and it occurs especially in negative past-tense forms of verbs with the stem vowel U or with a stem-fnal long vowel or diphthong. Te n-type participle appears statistically significantly with verbs with the stem vowel A in negative contexts in the Impilahti and Suojärvi areas. The nUn-variant favours verbs with the stem vowel e and is most frequent in Suojärvi. Te occurrence of different participle variants in different contexts indicates that the essive participle was first adopted from Finnish to Karelian in a specific context. These results support Larjavaara’s hypothesis and demonstrate the effect of the language contact across time. The essive participle probably superseded the older variant in the Ilomantsi area, while in the rest of Border Karelia older variants remained in use much longer.
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This article presents a corpus- and usage-based study on the contacts of Border Karelian dialects from the point of view of Russian-origin words (copies, in Lars Johanson’s terminology) and their phonological features. Te aim of the study is to describe the contacts between Border Karelian, i.e. partly mixed Southern and Olonets Karelian dialects, Finnish and Russian by comparing the dialects of six parishes as reflected in the synchronic spoken-language corpus of Border Karelian. Te dialects of Border Karelia were spoken until World War II in the easternmost part of Finland. They are distinguished from other varieties of Karelian by the strong influence of Finnish; this began already in the 17th century, and strengthened after 1944, when Border Karelia was ceded to the Soviet Union and its inhabitants were resettled in other parts of Finland. Te material of the corpus of Border Karelian has been recorded after the resettlement, from informants who no longer lived in their original home regions. Te study focuses on Russian copies that are a conventionalized part of Karelian and do not occur in Finnish. Te statistical tests indicated that differences in the frequencies of these words are statistically significant between the original parish dialects; the easternmost dialect has the most Russian copies, and the number of copies decreases from east to west with each successive parish. The results confirm the general hypothesis of Finnic language varieties as a continuum, on which the effect of Russian gradually grows as one moves east. Te continuum is geographical, and thus Olonets Karelian dialects do not have more Russian copies than Southern Karelian dialects, opposite to the assumptions. Accordingly, the results of the phonological analysis show that features which deviate from the phonotactics of Finnish are most frequent in the easternmost dialects and rarer in the west. Te features of vowels indicate that all Border Karelian dialects have had intense contact with both North Russian dialects and Standard Russian. In conclusion, the lexical and phonological impact of Russian on Border Karelian, increasing gradually from west to east, can be detected in the speech of Border Karelian informants even two decades after their resettlement to a Finnish-speaking environment.
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This article examines the possibilities and obstacles there are for collaboration between the students of preparatory training for upper secondary education and the students of upper secondary school. Additionally, this article discusses how the students, teachers and principals describe the possibilities for translanguaging in preparatory training. In Finland, the National Core Curriculum for Preparatory Training for General Upper Secondary Education was set out for the first time in 2014. Te responsible body for this curriculum is the Finnish National Agency for Education. Te curriculum is intended for immigrants and foreign-language speakers, rather than other student groups such as Finns with learning difficulties (e.g. the preparatory students are separated from the non-preparatory students, but in the same school). Te objective of the education is to provide young and adult immigrants with linguistic and other capabilities to transfer to general upper secondary education. Te preparatory education syllabus must be completed in 1-2 years and it contains studies in Finnish/Swedish language, in another language where necessary, studies in the student’s own language, subjects included in the general upper secondary education syllabus, and the skills and knowledge required to study in a general upper secondary school. Te curriculum also includes guidance counselling and one of its aims is to increase the students’ knowledge of Finnish society and culture. This article is based on the theory of usage-based language acquisition, which posits that the most important component of language learning is the interaction and usage of the language. Te central concept of the article is translanguaging, which is seen as an opposite to the monolingual norm. Recent research-based discussion on the monolingual norm and multilingual practices can also be found in this article. Te method of this research is based on linguistic ethnography. Te data consists of interviews with principals, teachers and students of the preparatory class in one school over two years. Video recordings of classroom practices and feld notes were also utilized. In contrast to the government’s intentions, the principals do not feel that the preparatory training should only be available to immigrants. The principals point out that the integration of the two schools could be positive for language learning. Despite championing co-operation between the preparatory and nonpreparatory students, the principals describe co-operation through activities such as joint celebrations of national holidays, rather than fully integrated education. Te teachers admit that interaction between students is very important, and claim they can notice if a preparatory student has Finnish-speaking contacts. In spite of this belief, the data reveals there is a lot of teacher talk during the lessons, and that the students are mainly listening to the Finnish of the teacher without the possibility of interaction in Finnish or in any other language. Te analysis of the student practices shows that at home it is possible to make use of translanguaging and that using the student’s own language makes it possible to learn science more effectively. Te following of the monolingual norm hinders learning to some extent. Te students also express the wish to have friends outside their own class, while still acknowledging the multilingual and multicultural power of their own class. In the curriculum, it is stated that education should encourage interaction between various cultural groups and “the original population” and promote good ethnic relations. Furthermore, the curriculum must include co-operation and participation in the general upper secondary school’s activities. This article shows that the students, due to the lack of collaboration in their class and with the other secondary school students, are not able to use large parts of their language repertoires, and that the fact that they live in a languagised world is only partly considered in preparatory training. Te main research finding is that the students only have limited interaction with the other Finnish speaking students in the school. In addition, the classroom usage of languages follows the monolingual norm. As such, the aims of the language learning cannot be fully realized. It is obvious that more teacher training is needed in both the theory and the practice of second language learning, for both language-specific and subject-specific teachers. Te surrounding society has to be taken into consideration as an important part of language learning.
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The article centres on human identity based on the adjective tapatus, -i, its verbal and nominal derivatives. It combines the structural approach towards meaning with the cognitive one. By referring to the data of opinion journalism kept in the Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian Language (CCLL), the article elaborates on the concept of human identity. The study revealed that based on the valency actants of the words under discussion and the predicates whose actants they themselves are, human identity is a peculiar entirety of the person which is sensed, perceived and/or created on the basis of duality right from birth: as the person’s close relationship with the partial – inherent or non-inherent, heavenly or earthly – identity. From a temporal perspective, inherent identity is more stable than non-inherent. Variability is associated with expression by different forms of yra tapatus and tapatinti(s).
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The aim of this study is to analyse the growing relevance of the concept sąjūdis and its spread in contemporary Lithuanian. By referring to the Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian Language developed by the Centre of Computational Linguistics of Kaunas Vytautas Magnus University, it was established that 28 words that were formed from the noun sąjūdis directly or from the formations of this word are used in Lithuanian: 14 nouns, 12 adjectives, one verb, and one adverb. These words are discussed from the perspective of word formation in the article by providing their meanings, forms, frequency of usage, and sources. For the sake of comparison, examples found through the web search engine Google are provided.
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The article focuses on the position of sentence adverbs in a sentence. Based on the examples found in the study, the article establishes the models of positioning two/three adverbs in a single sentence. It is attempted to determine whether an adverb can indeed appear freely in a sentence and whether two or three adverbs can be used in any position of a single sentence. It was found in which position sentence adverbs are used most commonly. The article mostly refers to the examples taken from the Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian Language developed by the Centre of Computational Linguistics of Kaunas Vytautas Magnus University and the examples found through the web search engine Google.
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The article continues the study on the reflections of the Samogitian identity, which are most prominent in daily communication. Referring to Kretinga Dialect Dictionary (2011) by Juozas Aleksandravičius, which provides an excellent presentation of the expression of mentality of the speakers of the Northern Samogitian Dialect of Kretinga, the present study seeks to reveal the connections between the peculiar characteristics of ethnically determined psychic phenomena of Samogitians (cf. Bliumas 1997) and the models of Samogitian daily speaking/communication. The research on the passages from daily discourse enables us to see the models of expression of the emotional conduct inherent in Samogitians and realise how the peculiarities of a certain linguistic conduct may affect and shape the emotional conduct of speakers.
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The article addresses the religious and mythological vocabulary of Germanic origin from the perspective of semantics and origin. Loanwords are divided into seven sub-groups: church buildings and their parts, administration, environment; church interior, places inside it; objects used in rituals, church items; festivals, rituals; church activities, books, musical instruments; names of persons; mythological vocabulary, names of supernatural beings. The base word of the Germanism from which it derived is established; the primary origin of the loanword is identified. Equivalents in other languages are presented. The recording of lexemes in the written language dating from the 16th century and their usage in the spoken language and dialects are also provided. The chronology of loanwords is discussed. It was found that Lithuanian olà is not only used in the meaning of ‘a cave, burrow of animals or birds’ as defined in the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language but also as ‘a chamber (for burial), crypt’ according to Bretkūnas’ Bible. The formations deriving from Germanisms are described as well.
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