Borrowing Development Research Articles

Foreword

In the mids of cold northern winds and landscape covered with snow we are pleased to announce the first ALA issue of the year 2019, which contains six research articles. Warm congratulation goes to all the authors, and words of appreciation to the Editorial team and recently enlarged proofreading team that have been working very hard in order to offer state-of-the-art contemporary linguistic research in this journal.
 The present issue is opened up by Mayuri J. DILIP and Rajesh KUMAR, who present a unified account of licensing conditions of Negative Polarity Items (NPI) in Telugu. In their work “Negative Polarity Items in Telugu” they analyze the distribution of NPIs in complex sentences with embedded clauses, and conclude that negation c-commanding NPI be conducted at the base-generated position.
 Kun SUN with his article “The Integration Functions of Topic Chains in Chinese Discourse” thoroughly presents the long and extensive Chinese research tradition on topic chains, and re-examines their core characteristics with the help of the so-called “integration functions”.
 The following paper “Tracing the Identity and Ascertaining the Nature of Brahmi-derived Devanagari Script” by Krishna Kumar PANDEY and Smita JHA exploits the orthographic design of Brahmi-derived scripts. Authors argue that such scripts should not be described with the existing linguistic properties of alphabetic and syllabic scripts but should instead gains its own categorization with a unique descriptor.
 Chikako SHIGEMORI BUČAR successfully submitted the article “Image of Japan among Slovenes” in which she represents the process and mechanism of borrowing from Japanese into Slovene. Conclusions briefly touch the image of Japan seen through the borrowing process and consolidated loanwords, and predict possible development of borrowing in the near future.
 Another interesting paper “Understanding Sarcastic Metaphorical Expression in Hindi through Conceptual Integration Theory” was authored by Sandeep Kumar SHARMA and Sweta SINHA. Based on a corpus of five thousand sentences, authors examine the abstract notion of sarcasm within the framework of conceptual integration theory, and with special reference to Hindi language. Findings aim to provide a theoretical understanding on how Hindi sarcasm is perceived among the native speakers.
 And last but not least, Điệp Thi Nhu NGUYỄN, An-Vinh LƯƠNG, and Điền ĐINH humbly observe research backlog in the area of Vietnamese text readability and write their paper “Affection of the part of speech elements in Vietnamese text readability” to encourage researchers to further explore the field and put Vietnamese findings on the world’s map.
 Editors and Editorial Board wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration.

Image of Japan among Slovenes

This paper presents the process and mechanism of borrowing from Japanese into Slovene. Japan and Slovenia are geographically and culturally quite distant, and the two languages are genealogically not related. Between such two languages, not many borrowings are expected, but there is a certain amount of borrowed words of Japanese origin in today's Slovene. The focus of this paper is on the words of Japanese origin that are well integrated in today’s Slovene. Firstly, the process of borrowing is analysed: there are three main phases for successful borrowing from Japanese into Slovene, but during the process, some obstacles may hinder the completion of this process, so that further creative use of some borrowed words in the Slovene environment cannot be expected. The second part of this paper will closely look at the loanwords of Japanese origin which are already recorded as headwords in today’s dictionaries of Slovene. The loanwords are analysed in relation to the borrowing process and adjustments, their semantic fields, and wherever possible, their diachronic changes in use, and other specifics. At the end, the image of Japan seen through the borrowing process and consolidated loanwords is summarized, and possible development of borrowing in the near future is predicted.

Automation and Networking as Effective Aids to Interlibrary Sharing of Resources

This thesis, through the fact that the libraries of China Tsinghua University and Xi'an Foreign Language University increase their interlibrary mutual borrowing development by means of the automation construction, illustrates that by the end of the 20th century the interlibrary mutual borrowing in university libraries of China will have shifted from traditional manual operations into the automatic, digital and network services and begins advancing towards social and international sharing of the resources.