Motivation of Word Formation in Russian and Arabic Languages and its Role in Achieving Translation Equivalence

The article is devoted to the issue of word-formation motivation, which does not lose its relevance and plays a role not only in disclosing formal-semantic relations between words of one language and has not only theoretical, but also applied significance. The authors consider word-formation motivation consistently in its varieties in a comparative way on the materials of so different languages as Russian and Arabic and approach the mechanism of achieving semantic equivalence of translation. To the greatest extent, word-formation activity today, due to objective reasons, affects some special branch (technical, medical, etc.) vocabulary, which is increasing from year to year in national dictionaries. This extensive material, selected by the authors, not only illustrates the current trends in word formation in modern languages, but also provides an answer to the question about the degree of equivalence of this subgroup of words in Russian and Arabic. The goal to compare word-formation motivation according to a number of criteria in different-structured languages made possible not only to obtain theoretical information about what features each of the languages has in word formation and what derivational potential it has, but also to reveal an algorithm for translating derived words from one language to another. For this, the authors complete a number of such particular tasks as highlighting significant elements in the neologisms of the Russian and Arabic languages, establishing standards for the formation of scientific and terminological vocabulary in Arabic, searching for tools (transformation operations, specific word-formation formants) that will contribute to the achievement of translation equivalence from Russian to Arabic, etc. Also the analysis of differences in the mechanisms of the formation of new vocabulary in the Russian and Arabic languages provided an opportunity to supplement the relatively young and rapidly developing private methodology of Russian-Arabic translation.

La localisation de témoins oïliques médiévaux. Le DRFM comme levier méthodologique

The recent Dictionnaire des régionalismes du français médiéval de l’Est (DRFM) constitutes an analysis of 389 lexemes contained in the corpus Documents linguistiques galloromans (DocLing, including about 2,350 documentary texts). These words represent concepts linked mainly to administration, commerce, and agriculture in the Eastern part of the Galloromance area (Champagne, Lorraine, Bourgogne, and Franche-Comté). More than half of these words are also attested in over 500 non-documentary texts of religious, literary, and practical nature. Such texts are notoriously difficult to localize, however, the regional words they contain aid this process considerably. In the present article, we distinguish three types of lexical regionalisms: « formal », « semantic », and « integral ». In the first section, we clarify the theoretical and phenomenological aspects of this distinction. We discuss the various roles of lexical regionalisms in the localization of non-documentary texts and, more specifically, the relative usefulness of formal regionalisms in this process. In the following sections, we demonstrate two methodological uses of regionalisms in non-documentary texts: 1. the localization of medieval texts or manuscripts (we provide 24 examples) and 2. the clarification or the resolution of ecdotical problems during the preparation of critical editions.

Not-fragments and negative expansion

This paper focuses on emphatic sentence fragments of the type Not in a million years!. While such fragments can be partially accounted for by a known type of ellipsis, namely ‘stripping’, it is argued here that this type is best treated as a construction in its own right, with formal, semantic and pragmatic properties specific to it. One useful concept is what could be called ‘negative expansion’. This is a discourse-level construction whereby an already negative clause is followed by one or more negative clause fragments, whose negation is a repetition, rather than cancellation, of the negation in the preceding clause, as in It will never happen. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.

Discourse-referential patterns as a network of grammatical constructions

Grammatical organization of conversational language presents us with the challenge of incorporating recurrent contextual and discourse-relevant properties in grammatical descriptions, as part of speakers’ conventional knowledge. Using data from conversational Czech extracted from the Czech National Corpus, I address this issue by tracing the relationships among a set of dative-marked expressions of interpersonal relations (traditionally labeled ‘ethical datives’) and their connection to argument-expressing dative NPs. The discourse-referential expressions form a family of distinct patterns, the differences having to do with person (1st, 2nd) and number (sg. vs. pl.); functionally, they range from marking subjectively assessed newsworthiness to signaling evidentiality and solidarity to expressing the speaker’s emotional state. The attendant reorganization of formal, semantic, and discourse features that define these dative-marked items amounts to several patterns – ‘interactional datives’ – and I show that they have the status of grammatical constructions, which are conventionally tied to certain types of discourse settings and speaker-hearer expectations. In order to represent these constructions and their relationship to other, partially related, patterns, I propose a network representation in the form of contiguous functional spaces that overlap at the boundary between argument-expression and interactional markers.

Inverse number in dagaare

This chapter examines the inverse number system in Dagaare (Gur; Niger–Congo). Inverse number systems possess a number morpheme which for some nouns encodes the plural interpretation while for others it encodes the singular interpretation. This chapter argues that a principled lexical semantic classification underlies the inverse number strategy in Dagaare, guiding whether for a particular noun the inverse morpheme codes the singular or the plural interpretation. The chapter further explores the functional grounding of inverse number, in terms of frequency and individuation, and presents a formal semantic account of the inverse number system.

Semantic Approaches to Number

This chapter presents semantic frameworks that model the general capability of language to refer to atomic, as well as non-atomic entities. Two approaches are developed and discussed in detail throughout the chapter: a set-theoretic approach and an approach in which entities are modelled as atomic and plural individuals. After the formal introduction of the two approaches, the chapter shows how number marking in language can be represented and how other concepts related to semantic number, in particular, distributivity, cumulativity and collectivity, have been analysed in formal semantic theories.

How the entrenchment-and-conventionalization model might enrich diachronic construction grammar

Explanations of language change in terms of Diachronic Construction Grammar generalize over gradual adaptations of the linguistic behaviour of individual speakers and communities. Presenting a diachronic case study of the pattern (the) (Adj) thing (clauserel) is (is) (that), I argue that the time course of formal, semantic and pragmatic changes, of changes in frequency and of changes regarding dispersion over speakers and choices of lexical items offer a glimpse of the gradual individual and communal adaptations underlying processes such as constructionalization and constructional change. I interpret data extracted from various corpora from the perspectives of Diachronic Construction Grammar and the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (Schmid 2020) and discuss how the latter perspective might enrich the former.

Dirty hands: Bribery in Russian anecdote

The study of the speech-genre and formal-semantic properties of Russian anecdotes on bribery is based the corpus of anecdotes, which also include jokes of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, differing from Russian ones only in the names of the “protagonists” appearing in them. It is established that the main means of creating a pun in a joke are the lexical and grammatical polysemy and homonymy, playing off the phonetic similarities and spontaneous humor. The comic effect in jokes on bribery can also be created by playing off idioms – their literalization or replacement of components. According to the corpus of anecdotes, the authorities act as an almost “exclusive” subject of bribery – officials of all ranks, police authorities and lawmakers. In the corpus of jokes on corruption, the axiological and praxeological aspects of bribery are traced clearly: the general attitude of society towards a bribe and its assessment. The research claims the ubiquity of bribery in power structures, and with regard to the miraculous disappearance of corruption, one can feel extreme pessimism as it is ineradicable and inescapable. Humor as the ability to notice the ridiculous side of someone or something and present it in a maliciously mocking form in the corpus of jokes on bribery is practically absent due to the domination of sarcasm and irony. In jokes, all the denunciatory pathos is directed at bribe-takers, towards whom there is hatred, impotent rage and hyperbolic cruelty. The “fight against corruption” is purely imitative, but it has several non-fictitious functions: a tool for reprisal against competitors and those who do not fit into corruption schemes. Among socio-cultural functions of the jokes on corruption, in addition to the entertainment function, the article identifies the cathartic-therapeutic function, aimed at relieving a psychological stress caused by the prevalence of bribery, and the aggression function, specified in the outrage by corruption.

I hope they don't get forgotten. A descriptive corpus-based approach to get-passives with verbs of cognition in English

It is widely held in the literature that English get-passives are only found with dynamic predicates, stative verbs being excluded from it. However, based on an extensive corpus-based analysis of occurrences with the verbs forget, know, remember, understand and believe, this article shows that the get-passive with stative verbs of cognition, although infrequent, does occur in English. The so-called cognitive get-passive is then examined in relation to the formal, semantic and pragmatic properties commonly claimed to define central get-passives with dynamic verbs. The analysis reveals, on the one hand, that these features are not equally relevant in the characterisation of these sentences and, on the other, that there exist strong interconnections between them and the lexical properties of the verbs analysed.