On the Problem of Lexicographical Representation of Productive Phraseological Patterns (As Shown by Modern Greek Constructional Phrasemes)

This paper discusses the problems of lexicographical representation of Modern Greek constructional phrasemes – productive phraseological patterns with one or more variable components (slots). The analysis of Modern Greek general and phraseological dictionaries has shown that, in Modern Greek lexicography, there is no unified approach towards the description of this type of phraseologisms. One of the significant problems associated with lexicographical treatment of Modern Greek constructional phrasemes is that some of them are registered in dictionaries as fully fixed expressions with their slot(s) filled with a specific lexeme or a specific proposition, without any indication that these expressions possess a variable component. Such lexicographical representation of productive phraseological patterns does not reflect the real linguistic usage and does not allow the reader of the dictionary to understand that the expressions described in the dictionary as fully fixed show considerable variation and possess one or two slots that can be filled with a wide range of words or word combinations. The corpus analysis of the constructional phraseme Ούτε να Ρ (literally, ‘neither if’), which is registered in Modern Greek dictionaries in five different, all fully lexically specified forms, has shown that the specific realizations of this productive phraseological pattern included in the dictionaries either have relatively low frequency of occurrence in the corpus, or are not encountered in the corpus at all. Other realizations of this phraseological pattern account for over 92 % of all the cases of its use in the corpus, but the common pattern behind them can hardly be identified with the help of the existing lexicographical descriptions, as it is registered in the dictionaries under the lemmas of five different lexemes that do not form part of its fixed component. Based on the findings of this study, the paper raises the issue of developing a new approach towards the description of productive phraseological patterns that currently pose a significant challenge for adequate lexicographical representation.

Das Zustandsreflexiv im Vergleich zum Zustandspassiv nach mantischen und syntaktischen Kriterien eine theoretische und konfrontative Studie

The present study deals with two vital linguistic phenomena, namely the state reflexive and the state passive in contemporary German. These linguistic phenomena are treated not only according to semantic, but also according to syntactic criteria. The state reflexive and the state passive play an important role in today's linguistic usage, so that they should be given special attention and interest as linguistic phenomena. The use of the state reflexive and the state passive gives the speaker or writer a means of avoiding superfluous language elements in the sentence. The present work tries to show the difference between the reflexive state and the passive state, since the Iraqi students as well as the German-learning Arabs have great difficulties in using these two grammatical phenomena.

SPECIFIC VOCABULARY USED FOR NAMING OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISES

Statement of the problem. The article is devoted to the interaction of advertising and specific stylistic components in the speech form of the proper name of a business enterprise which is a distinctive feature of the modern stage of language evolution. The research is carried out on the variety of inclusion of specific vocabulary in the proper names of business enterprises (PNBE) as well as grammatical forms of items belonging to other styles of speech in which they are adapted to the requirements of advertising. Besides, they are obliged to preserve legally important individualization of the proper name and its informative integrity. Results of the study. The complexity of interaction within the studied speech form of language units that differ in their initial stylistic relatedness has become evident. The direction diversity of legal and advertising requirements increases the number of speech units used for the proper names of business enterprises, translates specific vocabulary into the category of figurative proper names which encourages the emergence of new lexical units (we call them lexical equivalents) in the language system. These units are combined by the ability to convey the same specific meaning. Yet the typology of the found functional units, their number and other properties are not properly analysed. Conclusion. The development of trade and economic relations in the modern society, the need for their legal registration offers preliminary in many aspects varieties for the interaction of styles. They turn to be on the way to the state of the language norm used for the units of written speech which had been formed for centuries. At present, reasonable communication that is necessary for the field of formal (trade, economic and legal) relations is performed on the principles of linguistic usage which is systemically localized in colloquial speech.

Perception of Nigerian Dùndún Talking Drum Performances as Speech-Like vs. Music-Like: The Role of Familiarity and Acoustic Cues

It seems trivial to identify sound sequences as music or speech, particularly when the sequences come from different sound sources, such as an orchestra and a human voice. Can we also easily distinguish these categories when the sequence comes from the same sound source? On the basis of which acoustic features? We investigated these questions by examining listeners’ classification of sound sequences performed by an instrument intertwining both speech and music: the dùndún talking drum. The dùndún is commonly used in south-west Nigeria as a musical instrument but is also perfectly fit for linguistic usage in what has been described as speech surrogates in Africa. One hundred seven participants from diverse geographical locations (15 different mother tongues represented) took part in an online experiment. Fifty-one participants reported being familiar with the dùndún talking drum, 55% of those being speakers of Yorùbá. During the experiment, participants listened to 30 dùndún samples of about 7s long, performed either as music or Yorùbá speech surrogate (n = 15 each) by a professional musician, and were asked to classify each sample as music or speech-like. The classification task revealed the ability of the listeners to identify the samples as intended by the performer, particularly when they were familiar with the dùndún, though even unfamiliar participants performed above chance. A logistic regression predicting participants’ classification of the samples from several acoustic features confirmed the perceptual relevance of intensity, pitch, timbre, and timing measures and their interaction with listener familiarity. In all, this study provides empirical evidence supporting the discriminating role of acoustic features and the modulatory role of familiarity in teasing apart speech and music.

Less is More/More Diverse: On The Communicative Utility of Linguistic Conventionalization

We present empirical evidence of the communicative utility of conventionalization, i.e., convergence in linguistic usage over time, and diversification, i.e., linguistic items acquiring different, more specific usages/meanings. From a diachronic perspective, conventionalization plays a crucial role in language change as a condition for innovation and grammaticalization (Bybee, 2010; Schmid, 2015) and diversification is a cornerstone in the formation of sublanguages/registers, i.e., functional linguistic varieties (Halliday, 1988; Harris, 1991). While it is widely acknowledged that change in language use is primarily socio-culturally determined pushing towards greater linguistic expressivity, we here highlight the limiting function of communicative factors on diachronic linguistic variation showing that conventionalization and diversification are associated with a reduction of linguistic variability. To be able to observe effects of linguistic variability reduction, we first need a well-defined notion of choice in context. Linguistically, this implies the paradigmatic axis of linguistic organization, i.e., the sets of linguistic options available in a given or similar syntagmatic contexts. Here, we draw on word embeddings, weakly neural distributional language models that have recently been employed to model lexical-semantic change and allow us to approximate the notion of paradigm by neighbourhood in vector space. Second, we need to capture changes in paradigmatic variability, i.e. reduction/expansion of linguistic options in a given context. As a formal index of paradigmatic variability we use entropy, which measures the contribution of linguistic units (e.g., words) in predicting linguistic choice in bits of information. Using entropy provides us with a link to a communicative interpretation, as it is a well-established measure of communicative efficiency with implications for cognitive processing (Linzen and Jaeger, 2016; Venhuizen et al., 2019); also, entropy is negatively correlated with distance in (word embedding) spaces which in turn shows cognitive reflexes in certain language processing tasks (Mitchel et al., 2008; Auguste et al., 2017). In terms of domain we focus on science, looking at the diachronic development of scientific English from the 17th century to modern time. This provides us with a fairly constrained yet dynamic domain of discourse that has witnessed a powerful systematization throughout the centuries and developed specific linguistic conventions geared towards efficient communication. Overall, our study confirms the assumed trends of conventionalization and diversification shown by diachronically decreasing entropy, interspersed with local, temporary entropy highs pointing to phases of linguistic expansion pertaining primarily to introduction of new technical terminology.

Recontextualization and language change

This paper introduces the concept of ‘recontextualization’ and its benefit for the study of language change. ‘Recontextualization’ refers to the use of familiar material, such as tools or gestures, which extend the body in variable contexts of behaviour. The concept is related to notions already established in other fields, such as primatology and anthropology. We claim that these parallels are meaningful as they represent an overarching principle which underlies the emergence of linguistic structures but which also connects linguistic usage with other types of behaviour and interaction. We thereby argue against notions of context-independent form-meaning pairings in language, which require assumptions like innovation or reanalysis as mechanisms of usage and, ultimately, change. In this sense, we concur with usage-based approaches that define the linguistic expression as inherently vague, underspecified and variable. But we further argue that the emergence and, as a consequence, the empirically observable properties of any linguistic structure are to be accounted for by speakers using the same material in novel contexts or situations. Any such ‘recontextualization’ then creates, in turn, new options for the re-use of a linguistic construction. The underlying categorizations, which typically form part of the linguistic descriptions, pertain to the reality of the observer (the linguist) and not primarily to that of the speaker.

Stylistics and Terminology: Father Gjeçovi”s Influence on the Albanian Language Used in “Kanun”

It is of special importance to differentiate between the original Albanian language used orally by the Albanian highlanders reciting by heart the articles of the Codex “Kanun” and the Albanian language used by the staff who recorded the highlanders’ reciting, as well as the language used by the editors, who edited the book before it was forwarded for printing. Our study pays special attention to the abilities and capabilities of the recorder of “Kanun”, who was a renowned intellectual. He possessed all round knowledge of jurisprudence in general and the traditional law “Kanun” in particular because he was not only ordained a catholic priest but he was a law graduated as well. At the same time father Gjeçovi was a well known ethnographer, historian and archeologist. Our study aims at analyzing the material (stuff) recorded by father Gjeçovi focusing on some “artificial” out of place elements cropping up in such a material. Such elements are due to the double functioning of him as the recorder of the oral traditional law “Kanun”, but also as an editor of the recorded material. These recorded material of the traditional law is studied by us not simply as something frozen in that moment of time when Gjeçovi recorded them, but also as they evolved up to nowadays trying to shed light upon their “roots” in the framework of the linguistic usage.

Polarization and the Emergence of a Written Marker. A Diachronic Corpus Study of the Adnominal Genitive in German

This article investigates the diachrony of the adnominal genitive in written German by analyzing its usage in a diachronic corpus of sermons from the Upper German dialect area spanning the time from the 9th to the 19th century. The wide temporal scope allows for a better assessment of the events relating to the genitive’s disappearance from spoken German in Early New High German and the successive rise of its adnominal form in written German. Sermons make it possible to study the phenomenon over a long time because they provide a relatively consistent data basis in terms of genre and region. At the same time, as a genre that has characteristics of both spoken and written language, sermons show signs of changing stylistic trends, which makes them valuable for gaining insights in the divergent development of genitive use in spoken and written German. In order to characterize this divergence better, I use the concept of polarization, which describes the differentiation of linguistic usage between disparate contexts such as speech and writing. It becomes clear that the changes in genitive use found in the corpus cannot be viewed independently of sociopragmatic factors and their impact on the stylistic shape of the texts.*

Revisionary Analysis without Meaning Change (Or, Could Women Be Analytically Oppressed?)

This chapter develops a conception of philosophical analysis which makes sense of the idea that a correct analysis can be revisionary (in that it departs from ordinary or expert belief and linguistic usage). The view is superior to the alternatives defended by most proponents of ‘conceptual ethics’ and ‘conceptual engineering’ (according to which revisionary theorizing involves replacing words or concepts) because it better explains the arguments we advance when we engage with proposed revisionary analyses. A key idea is that analytic claims can emerge in the course of debate without change of meaning, so that our acceptance (perhaps late in the debate) of some analyticity can fix the meaning of a word as we used it all along. The discussion focuses on Haslanger’s revisionary analysis of gender.