LEXEMES DENOTING LOUD AND QUIET SOUNDS IN HILL MARI

В статье на материале горномарийского языка, относящегося к уральской семье, рассматриваются прилагательные и наречия со значениями высокой громкости (‘громкий’ / ‘громко’) и низкой громкости (‘тихий / тихо’). Данные собраны в ходе полевой работы в с. Кузнецово и окрестных деревнях методом анкетирования носителей языка и путем анализа собранного в экспедициях корпуса расшифровок устных текстов; также проведено сопоставление с материалами словарей. Учтены сведения из доступных (хотя и немногочисленных) исследований рассматриваемой группы лексики в других языках. Теоретической базой служит фреймовый подход к лексической типологии, опирающийся на анализ сочетаемости лексем. Обсуждаются семантические противопоставления в рассматриваемом поле (низкая громкость vs. отсутствие звука, речевые vs. неречевые контексты, особые лексемы для тихого поведения человека и тихой обстановки). Проанализированы модели полисемии лексем поля (использование в контекстах высокой и низкой громкости интенсификаторов с более широкой сочетаемостью, связь с семантическим полем скорости). Затронут ряд диахронических аспектов, в частности соотношение значений низкой громкости и низкой скорости с исторической точки зрения. Данные обсуждаются в свете теоретических работ, посвященных проблемам полисемии в лексике (Е. В. Рахилина, Т. И. Резникова, В. А. Плунгян и др.), средствам выражения каритивной семантики (С. М. Толстая и др.), противопоставлению между компонентом значения и отменяемой контекстом импликатурой (Е. В. Падучева, К. Кеарнс и др.). The article deals with adjectives and adverbs meaning ‘loud’ / ‘loudly’ and ‘quiet’ / ‘quietly’ in Hill Mari ( Uralic). The data were collected in fieldwork in the village of Kuznetsovo and in some nearby villages. I relied on the method of elicitation, as well as on the analysis of the corpus of transcribed oral narratives. The material from the published dictionaries was also considered. Studies of the domain in question (although quite rare) in other languages were taken into account as well. The theoretical framework of the article is the frame-based approach to lexical typology, which implies comparing the semantics of lexemes through the analysis of their combinability. I discuss semantic oppositions in the domain under consideration (low sound vs. absence of sound, speech vs. non-speech contexts, special lexemes for human behaviour and environment). Polysemy patterns developed by the relevant lexemes are analysed (the use of intensifiers with broad combinability in the contexts of loudness, the relation to the domain of speed). Some diachronic issues are touched upon, in particular the historical link between the meanings of low sound and low speed. The data are discussed in a theoretical perspective, including the issues of lexical polysemy (cf. papers by E. Rakhilina, T. Reznikova, V. Plungian, among others), caritive expressions in the lexicon (S. Tolstaya, among others), the opposition between a meaning component and an implicature which can be cancelled in a context (E. Paducheva, K. Kearns, among others).

The gradual erosion of NPI-hood with need verbs in Germanic

This talk addresses the puzzle why there are different ˋneed' verbs in Germanic languages, which all are lexically polysemous and which all display some extent of negative polar behaviour. Whereas all the uses of Dutch ˋhoeven' are negative polar, Modern Swedish ˋbehöva' is mostly distributionally unrestricted and only in its epistemic uses negative polar. Data suggest that this is a result of a gradual erosion of NPI-hood. The diverging behaviour of ˋneed'-verbs in Germanic languages can be most accurately managed assuming that lexical polysemy involves type hierarchy in which the different uses inherit from an abstract entry that defines semantics all these uses share. Moreover, it is concluded that if there is an NPI feature it is mandatorily inherited to all to its descendants. In languages such as Dutch this feature has scope over all uses, in languages such as Modern Swedish. it only bears scope over the epistemic uses.

Lexical polysemy and homonymy in the Middle High German language in light of the problematic of lexical synonymy and lexical-semantic analysis

Based on the compositions of pre-courteous epic poetry and chivalric romance written in the Middle High German language, this article reviews the problem of lexical polysemy in relation to the phenomena of homonymy and synonymy, as well as the problem of structural description of lexis. The need for comprehensive examination of polysemous lexemes in the Middle High German language, which includes structural analysis of the meaning of polysemous word and the lexical-thematic group and/or synonymic row it belongs to, well as the study of contextual implementation of the meanings of polysemous word, is substantiated by the principle of diffusivity of meanings of polysemous word that complicates comprising dictionary definitions and creates difficulties for the researcher in distinguishing the meanings of a polysemous word and separating polysemy from homonymy. Based on the example of lexical-thematic group for denomination of edged weapon in the Middle High German Language, the author demonstrates the appropriateness of using lexical-semantic analysis for establishing systemic relations between the analyzed lexemes, as well as postulates the importance of the context in determination of the structure of polysemous word. Discussion of the given examples from the compositions of pre-courteous epic poetry and chivalric romance written in the Middle High German language is accompanied by the author’s clarifications to the dictionary definitions of the lexemes under review. The conclusion is made on feasibility of the authorial approach towards detection of the discrepancies between lexicographic data and use of the lexeme in the texts written in the Middle High German language. The author also believes that this research is valuable from the perspective of lexicographic practice.

Let’s Play Mono-Poly: BERT Can Reveal Words’ Polysemy Level and Partitionability into Senses

Pre-trained language models (LMs) encode rich information about linguistic structure but their knowledge about lexical polysemy remains unclear. We propose a novel experimental setup for analyzing this knowledge in LMs specifically trained for different languages (English, French, Spanish, and Greek) and in multilingual BERT. We perform our analysis on datasets carefully designed to reflect different sense distributions, and control for parameters that are highly correlated with polysemy such as frequency and grammatical category. We demonstrate that BERT-derived representations reflect words’ polysemy level and their partitionability into senses. Polysemy-related information is more clearly present in English BERT embeddings, but models in other languages also manage to establish relevant distinctions between words at different polysemy levels. Our results contribute to a better understanding of the knowledge encoded in contextualized representations and open up new avenues for multilingual lexical semantics research.

A computational approach to lexical polysemy in Ancient Greek

Language is a complex and dynamic system. If we consider word meaning, which is the scope of lexical semantics, we observe that some words have several meanings, thus displaying lexical polysemy. In this article, we present the first phase of a project that aims at computationally modelling Ancient Greek semantics over time. Our system is based on Bayesian learning and on the Diorisis Ancient Greek corpus, which we have built for this purpose. We illustrate preliminary results in light of expert annotation, and take this opportunity to discuss the role of computational systems and human analysis in a complex research area like historical semantics. On the one hand, computational approaches allow us to model large corpora of texts. On the other hand, a long and rich scholarly tradition in Ancient Greek has provided us with valuable insights into the mechanisms of semantic change (cf. e.g. Leiwo, M. (2012). Introduction: variation with multiple faces. In Leiwo, M., Halla-aho, H., and Vierros, M. (eds), Variation and Change in Greek and Latin, Helsinki: Suomen Ateenan-instituutin säätiö, pp. 1–11.). In this article, we show that these qualitative analyses can be leveraged to support and complement the computational modelling.

Linguocultural Specificity of Chinese Poetry and Ways to Compensate them in Translation

The problem of language and culture correlation has long been the focus of considerable attention in Linguistics. It has recently acquired particular urgency due to the intensive development of linguistic culturology. The article deals with one of the aspects of the “language and culture” issue, namely the language influence on culture based on the linguo-cultural peculiarities of ancient Chinese poetry. The language-specific nature of this poetry is presupposed by the polytonic and isolating system of Chinese language, which results in impoverishing the rhyme and creating the certain monotony of rhythm. All this is also stipulated by hieroglyphic script which stimulates lexical polysemy and semantic integrity of linguistic units. Cultural peculiarity of Chinese poetry, in its turn, is caused by the presence of characteristic poetic genres unique to China, by the presence of cultural and relevant proper names and cultural realia as well as by the presence of special figurative (semiotic) codes in Chinese poetry. All these factors result in considerable difficulties while translating into other languages, especially into European ones. The article considers some ways of neutralizing these difficulties in Russian and English translations. It has been established, in particularly, that translators most often resort to the methods of substantiation, loan translation, and analogue translation. Most often, the external shape of poetry (rhythm, rhyme) has to be sacrifice (omission transformation).