Hybrid Characteristics of Prefixed Verbs in Yiddish

Languages differ along multiple dimensions (lexis, phonology, morphology, syntax). Related languages descend from a common ancestor language but have diverged over time. This paper asks whether languages diverge equally along all dimensions, and, to the extent that they do not, which dimension reflects the traditional language family tree best. We computed measures of (i) lexical distance (ii) phonetic distance, and (iii) syntactic distance. The measures were computed on all words and sentences extracted from a corpus of translations of four relatively short English texts into another four Germanic languages (Danish, Dutch, German, Swedish), five Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish) and six Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Slovakian, Slovenian). We examined the correlation structure of the distances for all pairs of Germanic (10), Romance (10) and Slavic (15) languages (i.e., within-family comparisons only). The results indicate that the linguistic dimensions are generally correlated (weakly but significantly), and that the correlations are stronger for pairs within families than when all 35 pairs are examined together. Cladistic family trees correlate best with the lexical distance (0.851 < r < 0.887). This confirms that the genealogical language trees are predominantly based on lexical rather than phonetic or syntactic considerations.

Our studies on phrasemes have confirmed their high frequency in modern Slavic, Romance, and Germanic languages and their usefulness in creating new realities, recognizing new cultural and social phenomena, but above all their appropriateness in naming new phenomena. Phrasemes are part of cultural, sociological, political, and economic changes. They create a bridge between science and society. On closer examination, phrasemes reveal their complex structure as resulting from various linguistic mechanisms. Phraseology is in the fast lane of linguistic communication, coining new forms that reflect the patterns of other languages, e.g., Polish compounds and combining forms derived as calques from German and French. What is important in phraseme formation processes is the mechanism of supplementing the original phraseme with further elements and its transformation. Due to the universality and usefulness of phrasemes in handling the phenomena of the modern world, they successfully play their role in modern Polish and other Slavic languages, as well as in Germanic and Romance languages, and hence these languages are in fact phraseme-based languages.

Intercomprehension is a communication practice where two persons speak their mother tongue and are able to understand each other without being taught the language of their adressee. It is a usual practice between languages that belong to the same linguistic family, for example Slavic, Romance or Germanic languages. In the article, the authors present the notion of intercomprehension as an alternative to communication in English as a lingua franca. That kind of communication was known among Scandinavians, whereas the first teaching method was developped for Romance languages (EuRomCom) at the beginning of the 21st century. Today, more methods exist including German and Slavic languages. In the article, the authors are enumerating some of them and also give a short outline of existing practices.

Medjezikovno sporazumevanje je sporazumevalna praksa, pri kateri dve osebi govorita vsaka svoj jezik in se med seboj sporazumeta, ne da bi se prej (na)učili jezika svojega sogovorca. Običajno je to mogoče pri jezikih, ki pripadajo isti jezikovni družini, na primer med slovanskimi, romanskimi ali germanskimi jeziki. V članku predstavljamo pojem medjezikovnega razumevanja kot alternativo sporazumevanju v angleščini kot lingui franci. Tako sporazumevanje je od nekdaj obstajalo med Skandinavci, prvo metodo pa so razvili za romanske jezike (EuRomCom) v začetku 21. stoletja. Danes obstaja več metod tudi za germanske in slovanske jezike. V članku predstavimo nekatere od njih, pa tudi možne prakse za utrjevanje medjezikovnega sporazumevanja.

The paper focuses on how English constructions with the prepositions into and out of, which evoke the CONTAINER image schema – basic to all humans, are rendered into Polish – a Slavic language. The examples for the analysis come from a Harry Potter book and its translation into Polish. The resource material abounds in constructions lexicalising spatial situations. Despite the fact that the CONTAINER image schema is generally conceptualised with regard to our bodily experiences, English constructions with into and out of may be translated into Polish in different ways. English and Polish – a Slavic language – belong to the same typological category with regard to encoding the path of motion – they are categorised as satellite-framed languages (see Talmy, e.g. 2000). Satellite-framed languages express the path of motion through satellites: free – verb particles or prepositions as can be done through English, or bound satellites – verb prefixes in Slavic languages. The paper presents the following patterns for translating English constructions with into and out of into Polish: standard with verb prefixes and prepositions; a pattern using different syntactic and semantic categories to denote the given path of motion or equivalent syntactic categories – verb prefixes, which structure the scene differently; a pattern where the path of motion and the CONTAINER- ype source or destination is omitted, also a pattern where the whole spatial scene is left out in the target version.

Reviewed by: Yearbook of morphology 1999 ed. by Geert Booij, Jaap van Marle Edward J. Vajda Yearbook of morphology 1999. Ed. by Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. Pp. 319. ISBN 079236631X. $157.50 (Hb). This Yearbook volume contains eleven articles, five on diachronic aspects of morphology, the rest dealing with miscellaneous topics. The data derives mainly from Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages. Martin Haspelmath is guest editor for the section on diachronic morphology. The articles here focus mainly on the motivation behind morphological change, or on the notion of which formal elements in a word (stem vs. affix, phonological stem trait vs. inflection) actually convey semantic content. Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy’s ‘Umlaut as signans and signatum: Synchronic and diachronic aspects’ (1–23) explores an instance where a phonological trait has come to express informational content. In ‘What sort of thing is a derivational affix? Diachronic evidence from Romanian and Spanish’ (25–52), Martin Maiden makes a similar argument for the function of derivational affixes, which, contrary to some claims (cf. Robert Beard, Lexeme morpheme base morphology, New York: SUNY Press, 1995), are shown not to be semantically vacuous. In ‘The development of “junk”: Irregularization strategies of have and say in the Germanic languages’ (53–74), Damaris NÜbling analyzes how these originally weak verbs became irregular across the various Germanic languages. Elisabetta Magni’s ‘Paradigm organization and lexical connections in the development of the Italian passato remoto’ (75–96) explores cognitive motivations for the development of irregular preterite forms. Elke Ronneberger-Sibold’s ‘On useful darkness: Loss and destruction of transparency by linguistic change, borrowing, and word creation’ (97–120) likewise deals with speaker awareness of phonological processes—a factor that manifests itself in speaker preference for specific types of word formation. The volume’s remaining six articles cover a range of topics, most dealing with cognitive processing. Marco Baroni’s ‘The representation of prefixed forms in the Italian lexicon’ (121–52) uses the distribution of intervocalic [s] and [z] allophones in Northern Italian dialects as evidence for whether speakers have come to regard certain historically prefixed stems as monomorphemic. In ‘On inherent inflection feeding derivation in Polish’ (153–83), Bożena Cetnarowska argues that in certain Polish word forms derivation must be able to follow as well as precede inflection. This raises interesting questions about the notion of lexical stem. In ‘The processing of interfixed German compounds’ (184–220), Wolfgang U. Dressler, Gary Libben, Jacqueline Stark, Christiane Pons, and Gonia Jarema explore the cognitive processing of compound words such as leben-s-lang ‘life-long’. Andrew Hippisley’s ‘Word formation rules in a default inheritance framework: A network morphology account of Russian personal nouns’ (221–61) provides an excellent encapsulation of network morphology, as well as a convincing account of how affix rivalry and exceptionality can be simultaneously accommodated in a theory of word form creation. Steven G. LaPointe’s ‘Stem selection and OT’ (263–97) gives an optimality theory account of stem and affix allomorphy, based on data from a variety of languages, including Korean and Cherokee. The book’s final article, Irit Meir’s ‘Verb classifiers as noun incorporation in Israeli sign language’ (299–319), argues that certain hand gestures bear striking similarities to the properties of certain types of noun incorporation. This excellent study is a welcome inclusion here for the new dimension it adds to understanding the essence of morphological structure shorn of the epiphenomenon of sound. All of these articles reflect the ‘cutting edge’ of morphological research, making this volume, like its predecessors in the same series, an important acquisition for any linguist or librarian serious about keeping pace with morphological theory. Edward J. Vajda Western Washington University Copyright © 2005 Linguistic Society of America

The article is dedicated to a quantitative (correlational and factor) typology of 31 language features (13 phonetic and 31 grammatical) as represented in 38 Indo-European languages and a corresponding differentiation between Slavic, Germanic, Romanic, Indic and Iranian language groups. The language features are grouped into 3 clusters: two contraposed “polar” clusters and an intermediate “medial” cluster. At the basis of the opposition between the two polar clusters 1 and 2 lies and a delimitation of “vocal” and “consonantal” language types, vowels constituting more than 30% of the phonetic system in the first case, in distinction to the second. The diagnostic features of Germanic and Romance languages pertain mainly to cluster 1, those of Slavic languages - to cluster 2. A further differentiation between Germanic and Romance languages is determined by the relevant role of the article, perfect, future-in-the past, diphthongs and long vowels in the first language group and the gerund, continuous tenses, nasalized vowels in the second. Indic languages are positively correlated with the Slavic group on the morphological level and with Germanic languages on the phonetic, Iranian languages correlate with the Slavic group on the phonetic level and are opposed to all the other language groups in their positive correlations with the morphological invariability of the noun, adjective, pronoun and verb. A general conclusion of the investigation is an ascertainment of a high degree of independence of the phonetic and grammatical systems of the languages concerned.

The idea of a compositional treatment of aspect in Slavic languages has recently been defended by several authors investigating aspectuality in these languages: e.g. Schoorlemmer (1995), Dimitrova-Vulchanova (1996) and Schmitt (1996). For Germanic languages a compositional approach was advocated in Verkuyl (1972). Compositionality turns out to work quite well, so the question arises how the two families can be united, the evident problem being that for Slavic languages it seems necessary to distinguish between aspect and Aktionsart, whereas this distinction has no clear formal correlate in Germanic languages. In Verkuyl (1993:318–327) attention was paid to a formal machinery relating a tenseless terminative or durative S to tense and in this way the Progressive Form in English could be dealt with in a compositional framework as one of the ways in which aspect may be distinguished from Aktionsart. Schoorlemmer, Dimitrova-Vulchanova and others provide evidence that such a distinction is justified in Slavic languges, but also that it differs from the traditional distinction based on aspectuality as a verbal matter, still found in modern Slavist work, e.g. in most papers of Flier and Brecht (1985) and Flier and Timberlake (1985). The present paper aims at bridging the gap between Slavic and non-Slavic languages by adopting the strategy to assume that Aktionsart and aspect are the same until there is evidence to the contrary, aspectuality being the term to cover the two traditional terms without any a priori commitment to the use of the two terms just mentioned. It will be shown that in Slavic but also Romance languages between the compositionally formed aspectual structure and tense there is room for an intermediate

The short form of the adjective in present-day German, which stems from the Indo-European protolanguage and for that matter is found both in the Germanic and Slavic languages, in the German language took its evolutionary path along the way of the rise and establishment of the morphological features and syntactic functions re-forging itself from one of the forms of expression of a qualificator word into a representative nominator of the morphological paradigm. It widened its syntactic functioning on account of the qualitative adverb that due to the reduction of final vowels, i.e. its grammatical markers, coincided by sounding and meaning with the short form of the qualificator words. In German, these processes brought about the appearance of a new part of speech known as Artwort with the categorical meaning of the qualificator attribution. It realizes its grammatical potentialities in the substance-predicate structure of the sentence revealing in this way a bipolar functionality. Proceeding from the lexicon-centric approach to the categorical meaning of the word including the "amorphous” word of the kind of GUT an attempt is being made to describe the specificity of this type of meaning. In the opinion of the authors the categorical meaning of the "amorphous” word”, which determines its morphological paradigm and syntactic behavior, is vested at the level of the mental lexicon of the speaker as awareness and linguistic experience of using this kind of word in communication. In this way the short form of the adjectives comes in possession of all the features of the elementary sign which non-discretely combines the lexical and categorical meaning. The text-centered approach to the identification of the grammatical concept of the elementary sign reduces the word to the root morpheme. The latter attains the categorical status in its usage which is detrimental to the hierarchical construal of language. The syntactically polar bi-functionality of the short form of the adjective as the elementary sign is foregrounded in the system of actual, real and potential predications and, specifically, in the structure of Paul’s "degraded predicates” as well as in the propositions of the sentence deep structure getting explicated by means of logical implicates that represent a bipolar syntactic functionality of qualificator words. The implicit propositions reveal homonymous ties of the short form of the adjective with the first constituents of compound words which in most cases show themselves as units of the phraseological level of language structure.

The aim of this research will be to conduct a comparative study of the category of aspectuality; that implies defining and analysing the whole complex of general and distinctive properties, characteristic of the languages under consideration, that is, Russian and German, revised in the comparative aspect. The research methods include descriptive method, distributive and introspective analyses. The authors indicate that today contrastive studies are especially relevant to identify common and distinctive features in systems of different languages. It is noted that actional and aspectual semantics, as well as the means of its expression, have become objects of study by linguists at the beginning of the 20th century. Attention is drawn to the actual domestic and foreign significant research in the field of aspectology of genetically unrelated languages, as well as languages that are in a distant genetic relationship. The form and tense of a verb are characteristics of temporality, since, for example, in the Slavic languages, the form organizes and determines temporal relationships. In contrast to the Slavic languages, in the Romance and Germanic languages, species relations are structured on the basis of temporal forms. The comparative approach to the study of time and species in languages belonging to different groups makes it possible to better understand the specifics of species-temporal relations. It is pointed out that the grammatical category of the species as a binary category is represented only in some languages. The need to distinguish between species as a grammatical category inherent in the Slavic languages and as a broad functional and semantic category that exists in all languages is emphasized, since it represents the entire complex of linguistic means that express the nature of the course of action. In the process of analyzing some texts, it was concluded that the absence of a grammatical category of the species in the German language does not indicate the absence of a corresponding concept. During the research, the authors came to the conclusion, that when studying the verb tense, it is necessary to take into account several other factors, apart from the verb forms: the context, the lexical, lexical-grammatical, grammatical and syntactic components, considered within the framework of their interaction in speech, since the functional-semantic field includes interacting means, united by the common function of expressing the semantic attribute of aspectuality, namely, grammar, lexical-grammatical and lexical means.

According to an aspectological model proposed by Kabakčiev in 1984, later developed and sophisticated, languages differ according to whether they mark aspect (perfectivity and imperfectivity) on verbs, as in the Slavic languages – among others, or through nouns/NPs featuring (non-)boundedness which is transferred onto verbs, as in the Germanic languages – among others. In this model of compositional aspect (CA), Bulgarian is a borderline case with a perfective-imperfective and an aorist-imperfect distinction and a definite article only (no indefinite), and the model is used to analyze Greek, a language exhibiting identical features. NP referents play a major role for the compositional explication of aspect. The study finds that Greek is of the same borderline/hybrid type of language as Bulgarian, featuring verbal aspect (VA) predominantly, but also peripherally CA. The aorist/imperfect distinction exists both in Greek and Bulgarian to offset the structural impact of the definite article. Analyzed are some conditions for the explication of CA in Greek and they are found similar to those in Bulgarian. However, there are specificites and differences between the two languages that must be further studied and identified. Keywords: verbal aspect, compositional aspect, definite article, article-aspect interplay, aorist-imperfect contrast

In this article, we tested some specific claims made in the literature on relative distances among European languages and among Chinese dialects, suggesting that some language varieties within the Sinitic family traditionally called dialects are, in fact, more linguistically distant from one another than some European varieties that are traditionally called languages. More generally, we examined whether distances among varieties within and across European language families were larger than those within and across Sinitic language varieties. To this end, we computed lexico-phonetic as well as syntactic distance measures for comparable language materials in six Germanic, five Romance and six Slavic languages, as well as for six Mandarin and nine non-Mandarin (‘southern’) Chinese varieties. Lexico-phonetic distances were expressed as the length-normalized MPI-weighted Levenshtein distances computed on the 100 most frequently used nouns in the 32 language varieties. Syntactic distance was implemented as the (complement of) the Pearson correlation coefficient found for the PoS trigram frequencies established for a parallel corpus of the same four texts translated into each of the 32 languages. The lexico-phonetic distances proved to be relatively large and of approximately equal magnitude in the Germanic, Slavic and non-Mandarin Chinese language varieties. However, the lexico-phonetic distances among the Romance and Mandarin languages were considerably smaller, but of similar magnitude. Cantonese (Guangzhou dialect) was lexico-phonetically as distant from Standard Mandarin (Beijing dialect) as European language pairs such as Portuguese–Italian, Portuguese–Romanian and Dutch–German. Syntactically, however, the differences among the Sinitic varieties were about ten times smaller than the differences among the European languages, both within and across the families—which provides some justification for the Chinese tradition of calling the Sinitic varieties dialects of the same language.

The research aims to explore the etymology and semantic field of the zoonym “cow” in the linguocultural contexts of the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic language families. The article analyzes the origin of the word “cow” in Slavic, Turkic, Romance and Germanic languages, identifying its core and additional meanings, commonalities and specific features. This analysis makes it possible to determine the national characteristics in the expression of knowledge about people, animals, and the world in mythological and religious beliefs by the native speakers. The scientific novelty of the research lies in considering the zoonym “cow” not only as a linguistic object, but also as a cultural phenomenon intertwined with history, mythology, religion, and human lifestyle. This zoonym is studied for the first time in a comparative aspect using data from Slavic, Turkic, Romance and Germanic languages, with the aim of identifying, analyzing, and describing national cultural features, similarities, and differences. As a result, the study proves that the etymology and semantics of the word “cow” in the contexts of the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic language families display shared roots, dating back to a distant past, and indicate profound connections between the peoples. Despite some differences among the peoples who speak Slavic and Turkic languages, such as national specificity of worldview, varying living conditions, traditions, history, and religion, the words designating the cow in various linguocultures are part of a unified history, connected to the use of this animal in human life.

The paper focuses on the main features of similes in the German language as well as the translation issues related to them. The comparative analysis of similes in the German and Ukrainian languages has been carried out to reveal the structural and semantic aspects of similes resulting in extended typology of similes in the German language. The analysis of the corpora of similes in the German and Ukrainian languages has demonstrated the presence of both similar and divergent semantic features inherent in them which stem from differences in mentalities of Germans and Ukrainians. Unique, specific fixed similes are observed in the in the idiomatic space of the German language. Similes can be rendered into the target language by the fully equivalent units, partial lexical equivalents, analogous counterparts, word-for-word patterns. The article pays special attention to the educational issues for foreign students to study German similes. Studies of similes extend to functioning of such units in the modern German language as some of them have turned to be outdated, got transformed, or changed their denotative meaning. The article confirms that similes as a special part of phraseology are productive, topical, valuable in terms of communication, as well as open for development. The research can result in compiling a dictionary of similes which will facilitate the studies of lexicology, stylistics, cultural studies, and practical course of translation for students specializing in German or those learning German as a second foreign language.

No abstract.