Contemporary Slovene Research Articles

The Return of the Worker in Contemporary Slovene Drama

The Return of the Worker in Contemporary Slovene Drama

Pregled sodobne slovenske mladinske proze

A significant development of some literary text types and genres (such as the contemporary fairytale, fantasy narrative, tale, youth novel) can be observed when researching contemporary Slovene youth prose. What can also be noted is the employment of contemporary themes and motifs, a detailed portrayal of literary characters, and, with most writers, also an exceptional sense for language. The article presents a selection of authors and their works, written during the last decade with some earlier exceptions, if they had made a significant impact on the development of Slovene youth prose. The works were selected according to their quality, interesting literary type, and topical themes and motifs. Also foregrounded in the opus of individual authors are those youth prose works, which particularly signify the authors and aid in their detailed presentation.

Pregled tipologije sodobne slovenske kratke proze (osemdesetih in devetdesetih let 20. stoletja)

The typology of contemporary Slovene short prose in the eighties and nineties of the twentieth century is made in accordance with the distinctive features correlated primarily to two basic paradigmatic structures: short prose is placed in the first paradigm, with predominantly new literary directions within the period of Slovene postmodernism, therefore the postmodernist type of prose falls into this category. The second paradigm covers the texts with notable spiritual and historical foundations of past literary directions (realism, existentialism, modernism) which are present in contemporary Slovene short prose in their modified form, frequently as some kind of an upgrade. Therefore the following types of contemporary Slovene short prose can be distinguished between in the second paradigm: ultra-modernist, irrationalistic-mystical, and neo-realistic, which covers the texts of minimalist and post-existentialist type.

Prozaist Kajetan Kovič

The article points out that Kajetan Kovič is far too frequently researched “only” as an outstanding poet, who provides contemporary Slovene poetry with classic, harmonious beauty, colour and tone. Unfortunately, more frequently than not, his interesting prose work is neglected, although it can undoubtedly be considered among the best prose written at the end of the 20th century.

Diaspora and Diasporisation: Slovene National Identity in the Contemporary Globalised World

Abstract After a brief presentation of the history of the concept of diaspora and its derivatives, and a critical review of the relevant literature, the article explores the phenomenon of diasporic Sloveneness, with a particular focus on the contemporary Slovenian diaspora. The concept encompasses, but is not limited to, Slovenes and members of Slovene national communities (with an emphasis on Carinthian and Trieste Slovenes) who have dispersed around the world since Slovenia’s independence in 1991. The author concludes that the contemporary Slovene diaspora consists mainly of young, highly educated people who are actively striving to establish themselves in the global world. Even though they have emigrated from their country of origin, they remain - especially through modern communication technologies - connected to it. The article provides an insight into the complex and multifaceted process of diasporic grouping and long-distance nationalism, which also includes processes of transculturation and sheds light on Slovene national identity in the contemporary globalised world.

Corpus-Linguistic Analysis of Speech Communities on Anti-Gender Discourse in Slovene

This paper deals with a corpus-linguistic analysis of different text/media types in Slovene with the aim of finding out whether or not any of the communication channels covered by the corpora employed in our analysis serve as a means of unification against the concept of gender, thereby serving as a catalyst for creating and maintaining (new) speech communities. We aim to determine this by extracting the two most commonly misused concepts (terms) in Slovene, i.e. gender theory and gender ideology, and analysing their use in three different corpora of contemporary Slovene: the reference corpus Gigafida 2.0, the corpus of user-generated communication JANES, and the ELEXIS Slovenian Web 2020 corpus. Thus, we confirm that the media for user-generated communication, Twitter in particular, serve as a medium on which speech communities are being built, with their members sharing common views, activities, and beliefs. Hence, Twitter is used as a medium for maintaining and reproducing mutual ideology.

Compilation of English Entries in the Contemporary Slovene Dictionary of Abbreviations

Abstract This article presents the compilation of entries for English abbreviations starting with A, which is part of a larger work, the Contemporary Slovene Dictionary of Abbreviations (CSDA), which is available on the Termania webpage. The structure of the entries was determined following an analysis of the layout and characteristics of entries in English dictionaries of abbreviations. Eleven Slovene terminological dictionaries and seven English dictionaries of abbreviations were examined to determine the structure of the entries. Based on the examples presented, a compilation structure was determined, and examples of entries for English abbreviations starting with A are presented. The structure used for the English abbreviations is an example of good practice that will be used in further compilation of CSDA.

Analytical forms of expressing the category of definiteness / indefiniteness in Slovene non-standard idioms

The article focuses on the article-like particle ta in Slovene non-standard varieties, which is used to express the category of definiteness / indefiniteness. We identified the peculiarities of functioning of the article-like particle ta in the contemporary Slovene speech, examined its functions and roles in the sentence. In our study, we relied on the data from the Corpus of the Spoken Slovene Language (GOS), materials of the Interactive Atlas of Dialectal Texts, some texts published in the adapted series “Kmečki glasovi” and in T. Logar’s collection “The Slovene dialects”. The emergence of the article-like particle ta is associated with the need to fill the gap after the loss of the opposition between short and full forms of adjectives. It is an indicator of the analytical way of expressing the category of definiteness / indefiniteness on the morphological level and is widespread in Slovene colloquial non-standard varieties. The particle indicates the familiarity of a certain person or object to the participants in communication and characterizes the object on the semantic level. In combination with ordinal, possessive and demonstrative pronouns, it is also a means to express the additional meaning of certainty. It can also express typicality of a feature. When combined with superlative forms of adjectives, it can emphasize uniqueness and specificity of a feature.

A GEOPOLITICS OF SLOVENIA, REVIEW

A GEOPOLITICS OF SLOVENIA, REVIEW

Dictionary of Modern Slovene

The ability to process language data has become fundamental to the development of technologies in various areas of human life in the digital world. The development of digitally readable linguistic resources, methods, and tools is, therefore, also a key challenge for the contemporary Slovene language. This challenge has been recognized in the Slovene language community both at the professional and state level and has been the subject of many activities over the past ten years, which will be presented in this paper. The idea of a comprehensive dictionary database covering all levels of linguistic description in modern Slovene, from the morphological and lexical levels to the syntactic level, has already formulated within the framework of the European Social Fund’s Communication in Slovene (2008-2013) project; the Slovene Lexical Database was also created within the framework of this project. Two goals were pursued in designing the Slovene Lexical Database (SLD): creating linguistic descriptions of Slovene intended for human users that would also be useful for the machine processing of Slovene. Ever since the construction of the first Slovene corpus, it has become evident that there is a need for a description of modern Slovene based on real language data, and that it is necessary to understand the needs of language users to create useful language reference works. It also became apparent that only the digital medium enables the comprehensiveness of language description and that the design of the database must be adapted to it from the start. Also, the description must follow best practices as closely as possible in terms of formats and international standards, as this enables the inclusion of Slovene into a wider network of resources, such as Open Linked Data, babelNet and ELExIS. Due to time pressures and trends in lexicography, procedures to automate the extraction of linguistic data from corpora and the inclusion of crowdsourcing into the lexicographic process were taken into consideration. Following the essential idea of creating an all-inclusive digital dictionary database for Slovene, a few independent databases have been created over the past two years: the Collocations Dictionary of Modern Slovene, and the automatically generated Thesaurus of Modern Slovene, both of which also exist as independent online dictionary portals. One of the novelties that we put forward together with both dictionaries is the ‘responsive dictionary’ concept, which includes crowdsourcing methods. Ultimately, the Digital Dictionary Database provides all (other) levels of linguistic description: the morphological level with the Sloleks database upgrade, the phraseological level with the construction of a multi-word expressions lexicon, and the syntactic level with the formalization of Slovene verb valency patterns. Each of these databases contains its specific language data that will ultimately be included in the comprehensive Slovene Digital Dictionary Database, which will represent basic linguistic descriptions of Slovene both for the human and machine user.

Генеалогија свакодневице: словеначка поезија у транзицији

The article attempts to detect and describe the change of the paradigm in contemporary Slovene poetry. If most of the Slovene poetry after the Second World War, or to be more precise, from the late 1950s onwards, was written in the modernist key, with the “serious” existential themes and often dark and hermetic speech as prominent features, we may assume that in the 1980s this kind of poetry was slowly beginning to disintegrate. Although in this decade the so-called Neo avant-garde (or ultramodernist) poetry, which surfaced in the 1960s, became almost obsolete, the poetry of Tomaž Salamun, the leading voice of the Slovene Neo avant-garde poetry, functioned as some sort of the major catalyst for the new poetry. If we may borrow the distinction between the “cooked” and “raw poetry”, first used by Robert Lowell with regard to the new American poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, we can detect such new poetological tendencies which focus on the mundane themes of the everyday urban life, often written in a spontaneous and sometimes colloquial language, free of formal and metaphysical maneuvers of the so-called “academic”, “cooked”, or “moderate” modernism. To illuminate this poetological transition, the article focuses on the year 1991, which coincides with the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the formation of Slovenia as a new national state. In this year, many of the new young poets started their poetical careers. The brief analysis of the poetical debuts of the poets such as Brane Senegacnik, Vid Snoj, Miklavž Komelj, Jurij Hudolin, Peter Semolic, and Uros Zupan attempts to demonstrate that most of the poets are still indebted to the modernist paradigm (with Dane Zajc and Niko Grafenauer as its main representatives), but nonetheless, in some cases, the traces of the new, “cooked” urban and narrative poetry can be observed on the margins of these debuts. These elements, however, are the most prominent in the book Sutre, written by Uros Zupan, who also happens to be most influenced by the poetry of Tomaž Salmun on the one hand and the American poetry of the beat generation and New York School on the other. These influences were of the utmost importance in the first stage of the new poetic paradigm that at the beginning of the 1990s strove to overcome the modernist literary tradition. The poetry of Uros Zupan thus paved the way for the new mainstream of contemporary Slovene poetry that appeared in the new millennium.

A corpus-based study of 16th-century Slovene clitics and clitic-like elements

This paper undertakes a corpus-based linguistic investigation of the spelling variation in 16th century Slovene both from the diachronic and synchronic points of view. The investigation is based on a manually annotated sample (approx. 14,000 word tokens) from Primož Trubar’s Ta pervi deil tiga Noviga teſtamenta, 1557, and Hiſhna poſtilla, 1595, and Jurij Juricic’s Poſtilla, 1578, and it concentrates on clitics and clitic-like elements. Statistical analysis, based on comparison of the spelling conventions of the early modern period to those of contemporary Slovene using normalised forms of the originals, where we observe cases where one orthographic word is nowadays written as two or more words (1–n mapping) or vice-versa (n–1 mapping), shows that the overall percentage of split and joined word tokens is 5.7%, with JPo 1578 having the highest percentage, and TPo 1595 the lowest, less than half of that of JPo 1578. Of these, the vast majority is for cases where a word is now split. The most predominant among the bound words are non-syllable prepositions v ‘in(to)’, k ‘to’, and z ‘with’, followed by negative proclitic ne ‘not’, enclitic particle li ‘whether, if’ and in rare instances conditional particle bi, reflexive particle se, na ‘on’, ob ‘at, by’, pri ‘at, beside’ and za ‘for, behind’ (the absolute numbers of specific clitics partially correlate with the prevalence of bound variants in comparison with the freestanding variants of those clitics, with the most frequent being predominantly bound while the least frequent are predominantly freestanding). Individual instances of two accented words written together can be attributed to German influence (figino_drevo, der Pfeigenbaum ‘fig tree’).The cases where one modernised word correlates to two original words are, with the exception of superlative adjective/adverb prefix naj-/nar- ‘the most’ that is orthographically bound with its root in about 25% of instances, sporadic or can be identified as errors in the original books. Of interest are also cases when beginnings of words that are homonymous with non- or one syllable prepositions are separated from the remainder of the word with an apostrophe (eg. s’_nameinja ‘signs’, s’_derſhati ‘to endure’, do_bruta ‘goodness’, sa_doſti ‘enough’). The normalisation also enables the identification of the orthographical variants of the most commonly bound clitics, i. e. non-syllable prepositions k, z and v. K and its allomorph /h/ have 5 attested spelling variants, of which one is limited to hosts starting with a v-. For z with a voiced allomorph /z/ and voiceless allomorph /s/ three variant spellings were discovered that only partially correspond with a voiceless/voiced distinction of the initial sound of the host word, and the cases of merging with the host that begins with s-/z- were identified. Additional positional spellings probably represent other allomorphs: for palatalized /ž/ in front of a palatal n and , >ſo/so> for syllabified /za/, /zo/. The preposition v shows the highest degree of orthographical variation of all analysed words as it has 10 different spellings: general bound and and freestanding ; , and in front of a vowel; and attested only in front of a v-, as well as and merged with the initial v- of the host.The analysis of spelling variation in non-syllable prepositions showed that even a relatively limited hand-corrected annotated sample enabled identification of majority of spelling variants identified in previous works, while with the use of noSketch Engine tool further information about their relative frequency and distribution was obtained. As the hand-corrected corpus is expanded such research will yield even more relevant information for the study of the 16th century Slovene literary language that will significantly supplement existing findings (based on traditionally collected examples) with the help of a large amount of statistically relevant data.

Parlameter – a Corpus of Contemporary Slovene Parliamentary Proceedings

The paper presents the Parlameter corpus of contemporary Slovene parliamentary proceedings, which covers the VIIth mandate of the Slovene Parliament (2014-2018). The Parlameter corpus offers rich speaker metadata (gender, age, education, party affiliation) and is linguistically annotated (lemmatization, tagging), which boost research in several digital humanities and social sciences disciplines. We demonstrate the potential of the corpus analysis techniques for investigating political debates. The corpus architecture allows for regular extensions of the corpus with additional Slovene data, as well as data from other parliaments, starting with Croatian.

Soproge slovenske elite v Ljubljani in Trstu

V drugi polovici 19. stoletja so se vzporedno z vzponom meščanstva in njegove morale načini poročnih izbir začeli znatno spreminjati. Proti koncu 19. stoletja so se ustvarile nove zapovedi in posredne prisile »odgovorne izbire poročnega partnerja oz. partnerke«. V tekstu preko analize slovenskega tiska, literarnih del ter ego dokumentov, predstavljamo tovrstni diskurz. Preko analize vzorca poročenih parov slovenske elite (v Ljubljani in Trstu) pa predstavljamo dejanske poročne izbire slovenske elite.

A phantom pain of the amputated country. Yugoslav sociocultural space in the texts of contemporary Slovene authors

A phantom pain of the amputated country. Yugoslav sociocultural space in the texts of contemporary Slovene authors

‘Knowing How’ in Slovene: Treading the Other Path

For the linguistic expression of the concept of knowledge, the Slavic languages use verbs deriving from the Indo-European roots * ĝnō and * ueid . They differ in terms of the availability of both types of verbs in the contemporary standard languages and in terms of their semantic range. As will be shown in this paper, these differences are interesting not only from a language-specific lexicological point of view, but also in the context of the intersection of lexicon and grammar. Covering the domain of ‘knowing how,’ the * ĝnō -based verb in Slovene ( znati ) has been extending into the domain of possibility and, on this basis, developing into a modal verb. While this development is not surprising from a typological point of view, it is remarkable from a Slavic perspective, since this particular grammaticalisation path towards possibility is otherwise unknown to Slavic. This peculiar feature of Slovene, which most probably relates to its long-lasting and intensive contact with German, is illustrated in the present paper by comparing Slovene to Russian on the basis of three main questions: 1) the semantic range of vedeti / vedatʹ and znati / znatʹ , 2) the lexicalisation of ‘know how,’ and 3) the relation between knowledge, ability, and possibility. The focus is on contemporary Slovene and Russian, leaving a detailed diachronic investigation and the further embedding into a larger Slavic and areal perspective for future analyses.

‘Knowing How’ in Slovene: Treading the Other Path

For the linguistic expression of the concept of knowledge, the Slavic languages use verbs deriving from the Indo-European roots *ĝnō and *ṷei̭d. They differ in terms of the availability of both types of verbs in the contemporary standard languages and in terms of their semantic range. As will be shown in this paper, these differences are interesting not only from a language-specific lexicological point of view, but also in the context of the intersection of lexicon and grammar. Covering the domain of ‘knowing how,’ the *ĝnō-based verb in Slovene (znati) has been extending into the domain of possibility and, on this basis, developing into a modal verb. While this development is not surprising from a typological point of view, it is remarkable from a Slavic perspective, since this particular grammaticalisation path towards possibility is otherwise unknown to Slavic. This peculiar feature of Slovene, which most probably relates to its long-lasting and intensive contact with German, is illustrated in the present paper by comparing Slovene to Russian on the basis of three main questions: 1) the semantic range of vedeti / vedatʹ and znati / znatʹ, 2) the lexicalisation of ‘know how,’ and 3) the relation between knowledge, ability, and possibility. The focus is on contemporary Slovene and Russian, leaving a detailed diachronic investigation and the further embedding into a larger Slavic and areal perspective for future analyses.

The Slovene trilogy Alice in Crazyland by Evald Flisar

The British writer Lewis Caroll exerted influence upon Slovene authors writing for young readers for his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871). Contemporary Slovene writer Evald Flisar wrote his trilogy about Alice as a fantasy tale (Alice in Crazyland, 2008), a play (Alice in Crazyland: an ecological force, 2010) and as a comic strip and a graphic novel (Alice in Potteroonia, 2013, illustrated by P. Kovacic). His trilogy, particularly Alice in Crazyland (2008), reflects the philosophy of the Slovene theoretical Slavoj Zizek in his pathological Narcissus as a Socially Mandatory Form of Subjectivity (1985).

Struktura besednodružinskega slovarja slovenskega jezika za črko B

Besednodružinski slovar slovenskega jezika prinaša sintezo teoretičnih spoznanj slovenske besedotvorne teorije, ki je aplicirana v slovarskem delu, Strukturiran em po načelu besednih družin. Poleg slovaropisnih poskusov v prvi polovici 19. stoletja (U. Jarnik 1832; A. Murko 1833) je to prva tovrstna slovarska realizacija za sodobno slovensko besedje, ki domače slovaropisje aktualno približuje podobnim slovarskim uresničitvam v ruščini, nemščini in bolgarščini. Slovar ponuja tudi oceno o relevantnosti zbranega besedja tako, da vključuje podatke o pojavitvah v obeh slovenskih besedilnih korpusih (Fida, Nova beseda), ki vsak s svojega zornega kota osvetljujeta živostin rabo tvorjenk, zato je primer dela, kjer so rezultati dobljeni na podlagi sinergije več dejavnikov.

Skladenjska zapletenost povedi v govorjenem jeziku sodobnih slovenskih politikov

V članku je obravnavana skladenjska zapletenost povedi v govoru današnjih slovenskih politikov. Analizirana je skladenjska zgradba povedi, rezultati analize pa so primerjani z rezultati prispevka Nataše Hribar: Vprašanje skladenjske zapletenosti v govorjenem jeziku politikov. Članek odgovarja na vprašanje, ali je npr. govor Janeza Janše skladenjsko zapleten ali preprost. Ugotavlja se tudi, kakšna zloženost povedi prevladuje v njegovem govoru, katere vrste odvisnikov in priredij so najpogostejše, koliko je bilo eno- in večstavčnih povedi, kolikopastavkov in soredij ter katera razmerja so uporabljana v zapleteno in katera v preprosto zloženih povedi.