Diachronic Comparison Research Articles

Этнопсихолингвистика почти 25 лет спустя, или научное предвидение Александры Залевской

Professor Zalevskaya considered one of the most important fundamental tasks of Russian Psycholinguistics to be the discovery of cultural and national specifics of speech activity. In modern Ethnopsycholinguistics, three stable directions are developing on the basis of theoretical and experimental research of speech action: synchronic psycholinguoaxiology, diachronic psycholinguoaxiology, diagnostic (psycho)linguoaxiology. Each of these areas develops its own conceptual apparatus and methods, based on the developed principles, the first establishes the content of values, verifiable ranking, and scaling of the experimental data obtained. The second examines the main psycholinguistic factors influencing the dynamics of the content of axiological concepts and the change in hierarchy in value systems. At the same time, a diachronic comparison of axiological fragments of the worldview of speakers of a certain linguistic culture modeled for different times is possible. In the third of these areas, the content of the current value system is used to diagnose social relations of various kinds in a particular society. The author defines the concepts of basic value, cultural significance and meaning, cultural connotations that differ from those accepted in the linguistic and cultural paradigm, and presents some of the main provisions of the declared directions of ethnopsycholinguistics. The author presents some methods of analyzing associative fields that allow us to explore the predicative relationship between a stimulus and a reaction, which makes it possible to determine the personal meaning of values and value orientations of an individual.

SEMANTIC DYNAMICS OF BUSINESS IN STYLISTICS OF SOCIAL COMMUNICATION

The article is devoted to the linguistic and stylistic motivation of the "business" nature in the time and space of culture. The research idea regarding the need for professional analysis of the evolution of business is formulated and argued: from the primary meaning of the word to the modern one, which reflects the values and priorities of the development of the modern world, verbalized as a result of active processes of literary language development. The functioning of "business" concept in heterogeneous communicative fragments — in the structure of word combinations and fixed expressions — is studied, which explains the nature and scope of its application and the effective expediency of its use in multilingual contexts. The status of business in the language consciousness of society and the general state of business activity are considered through a diachronic comparison of the semantics of the term "business" in general language dictionaries of different editions. Therefore, attention is focused on common and professional definitions of the concept of business, their features and differences. For the dynamics of the objectivity of stylistic studies of business communication, it is determined that it is relevant to characterize the nature of business as a phenomenon, its strategies and tactics, which appear as systematized communicative intentions of speakers and determine effective models of their verbal interaction in this area. At this stage, we consider such tasks to be promising for further research, since business linguistics aspectology is projected onto the system of current issues that determine the vectors of development of national linguistics. Taking into account the development of multimedia technologies, which today actively affect all spheres of public communication, determine the dynamic nature of their functional and stylistic adaptation to the priorities and values of the mass audience, the task of the research perspective of creating and implementing an effective functional model of business communication, in particular, in the media space, was formulated.

Договор каршеринга в России и за рубежом: развитие института

The subject of research in the article is the history of emergence and development of the carsharing agreement. In order to identify the characteristic features of this agreement the author has studied the history of regulation of relations on the transfer of vehicles for short-term possession and use in domestic and foreign legal orders. The legal, economic and historical circumstances determining the structure of contractual relations of the mentioned agreement are considered within the framework of the work. According to the results of diachronic comparison of carsharing legal relations of the last century and modern legal models the conclusion is made about the peculiarities of continuity of subspecies of the carsharing agreement by the domestic legal system.

Staden i boken

The City in the Book: Materiality and Form in Irina Liebmann’s Documentary Portrayals of Berlin This article considers the relationship between urban materiality and literary form in three documentary portrayals of Berlin by Irina Liebmann: a book of interviews with East German tenants, Berliner Mietshaus (1982), the photo-essay Stille Mitte von Berlin (2002) and the autofictional novel Die Große Hamburger Straße (2020). I use and develop Andreas Mahler’s model for analysis of the “discursive constitution” of urban literature to investigate how various linguistic and formal expressions are used in the texts to represent the material properties of two urban entities: the tenement building and the street. My analysis shows how urban materiality is discursively constituted through referential elements and “material isotopy” (frequent use of materially connotated concepts), as well as through other linguistic means that can be connected to the materiality of the portrayed places such as the structure, layout, typography and interpunctuation of the text. In two of Liebmann’s texts, a further spatio-visual dimension arises through the inclusion of her own photographs of dilapidated buildings, closed-up shops and empty lots in East Berlin in the 1980s. The findings of my investigation demonstrate how Liebmann’s documentary portrayals of Berlin contribute to making visible the fluctuations in how different material circumstances – for example standard of living – are valued in different contexts, as well as to a renegotiation of hegemonic narratives about the city’s historic materiality. Finally, a diachronic comparison between the three texts shows that specific material entities such as streets and buildings in the old center of Berlin have been charged with new meaning after 1989 due to the fundamental alterations to the material conditions of the city through a rapid gentrification process.

The Establishment of the Agricultural Landscape of Central Sicily Between the Middle Neolithic and the Beginning of the Iron Age

The possible co-variation of human occupation and vegetation from the Middle Neolithic to the beginning of the Iron Age (7.5–2.8 ka BP) in Central Sicily in the context of the central Mediterranean between Middle and Late Holocene are analysed in this paper to provide new insights on Sicilian prehistoric demography. The demographic and economic trends during these millennia were reconstructed using archaeological, Accelerator Mass Spectrometry 14C dates, palynological, archaeobotanical, and zooarchaeological data from the northern, central, and southern sectors of Central Sicily through a diachronic comparison with variation in Arboreal Pollen, Anthropogenic Pollen Indicators, Olea-Juglans-Castanea pollen, microcharcoals, and Sporormiella from four pollen cores from sites in different ecosystems. A very significant spread of farming activities was found at the end of the Neolithic, together with an apparent demographic gap during the Middle Copper Age, and the emergence of agricultural landscapes at the end of the Copper Age associated with a striking increase in population. A combination of cultural and climatic changes during the late phase of the Bronze Age resulted in a subsequent overall decrease in population.

Representations of obesity in Australian and UK news coverage: A diachronic comparison

In both Australia and the UK, the number of adults living with obesity has been increasing over the last 30 years (AIHW, 2023; Baker, 2023). Although policy has emphasised ‘community-based interventions’ in Australia (AIHW, 2017) and ‘system-wide approaches’ in the UK (Ulijaszek and McLennan, 2016) for overcoming the challenges of obesity, previous research has shown that media representations have been dominated by representations promoting individual responsibility (e.g., Kim & Willis, 2007). In this paper, we report our observations of representations documented in corpora of media coverage from Australia and the UK between 2008-2017. The corpora amount to 16.4 million tokens and 36 million tokens, respectively. We identify key semantic domains for each year of the corpora and discuss both consistent and shifting themes in the data. Our findings show that the Australian coverage provides a more sustained focus on responses to obesity at the societal level, referring to practices in the food industry and differences between communities that can lead to health disparities. By comparison, while there is an increase in the amount of coverage in the UK press referring to obesity, the content became more narrowly focussed on food consumption and weight loss over the study period. The findings demonstrate how media coverage contributes to public understanding of how to respond to the challenges of obesity.

A lexicon-based diachronic comparison of emotions and sentiments in literary translation: A case study of five Chinese versions of David Copperfield.

In the Chinese context, translations have served as a useful conduit for providing access to wider literature authored in other languages. A prominent question has been whether translators' linguistic choices are influenced by factors such as translators' social and cultural background and emotions towards the texts they are translating. When multiple translations of the same text over a span of time are produced, another layer of complexity is introduced, and research such as the present study, must examine how or whether variation in the expression of emotions within translations produced over a period of time is discernible. To this end, the present study made use of Lexicon-based Sentiment Analysis (LBSA), a common natural language processing (NLP) approach, to study people's attitudes, opinions or emotions towards a certain person or thing. LBSA has attracted much attention in the literary works or translated works for analyzing reader response and appraisal of the works themselves. The present study undertook a diachronic comparison of emotions and sentiments in five translations of David Copperfield based on the emotion lexicons. The corpus of the study comprised translations of five books and 3,084,599 tokens. We applied the computational method of emotion and sentiment analysis to the emotion words in the five translations. In addition, we used python and R package to analyze the positive and negative words in five versions. The study revealed that translators as social beings in the target world express unique reactions towards the same emotion in the original text as well as in literary translations. Yet, the modern vernacular Chinese versions also showcase a similarity in the expression of emotions thus demonstrating the decisive role of the overall flow of emotion in the original plays and in translation. The contribution of the study is significant as it is a pioneering investigation given that it undertakes a sentiment and emotion analysis of literary translations in Chinese.

Возрастной критерий уголовно-правовой деликтоспособности лица

Tort capacity is the central institution of any branch of law that regulates tort relations. Determining the procedure and conditions for bringing subjects to responsibility, fixing the types and sizes of punishments to which they may be subjected, the legislator has no right to ignore the fact that the delinquency of these subjects is predetermined by their properties. Criminal law has a special role in the system of regulation of tort relations. Among all offenders, criminals are subject to the most severe measures of state-legal response. This article is devoted to the study of one of criteria of criminal law capacity – the age at which an individual can be held criminally liable, as well as the problem of the so-called age-related insanity of minors, which excludes the possibility of their participation in tort legal relations. The article presents a synchronous comparison of approaches to establishing the age of criminal responsibility adopted in the international community and in individual countries, as well as a diachronic comparison of these approaches in Russian criminal law. Regularities are revealed between the difference in approaches to determining the age criterion of criminal law capacity for delinquency and the difference in the scope of measures of state coercion applied to juvenile offenders. Three principles of establishment and differentiation of the named age criterion are defined. The examples of the current criminal legislation illustrate the adverse consequences of non-compliance with these principles. Based on the analysis of judicial practice, the problems of legislative regulation of the age-related insanity of a minor who has committed a socially dangerous act have been identified. The conclusion is made about the possibility of a conflict between the principles of establishing the age of criminal responsibility and ways to achieve a balance of general and private interests are proposed.

Diachronic Comparison of Three Historical Skeletal Series from Croatia with Regard to Mandibular Bone Quality

The aim of this study was to assess the quality of mandibular bone using CBCT images in archeological populations that inhabited Croatia from the medieval to the Early Modern Period. A total of 88 human skulls (45 male and 43 female) from three samples (pre-Ottoman (N = 27), Ottoman (N = 32), and Vlach (N = 29)) were analyzed by using CBCT. The mental index, gonion index, antegonion index, panoramic mandibular index, degree of resorption of the alveolar ridge, and cortical index of the mandible were evaluated using the OnDemand3DApp. The results showed an expected higher value of cortex thickness in males when compared to females. Females in the younger groups had higher values of cortical thickness than those in the older age group. The Ottoman sample had significantly lower values of mandibular indices than the other two samples. There were no age-related differences in bone thickness in males, suggesting that hormonal changes have a stronger influence in females. Lower values of mandibular indices in the Ottoman sample may be an indicator of specific factors that influenced this population. Our study of bone changes in archeological populations with different living conditions may contribute to a better understanding of impact of biocultural factors on physiological and pathological processes, which are extremely complex in bone tissue.

The effect of economic conditions on poverty perception in Minnesota

The paper analyzes subjective poverty in St. Louis County, Minnesota, with the methods of systematic data collection in 2020 and makes a diachronic comparison using the results of a similar survey from 2010. The paper identifies the most important poverty-related items and compares the precise meanings of the results of the 2010 and 2020 surveys. It also aims to find out how the recovery after the recession of 2008 modified perceptions of poverty. It is revealed that poverty in 2020 is mainly associated with items related to material needs. Many of the items mentioned in relation to poverty are related to financial issues, to basic human needs, or to physical safety. The paper concludes that in spite of the economic recovery, subjective poverty did not change significantly in the examined period.

Remnants from the Past: From an 18th Century Manuscript to 21st Century Ethnobotany in Valle Imagna (Bergamo, Italy).

This project originated from the study of an 18th century manuscript found in Valle Imagna (Bergamo, Italy) which contains 200 plant-based medicinal remedies. A first comparison with published books concerning 20th century folk medicine in the Valley led to the designing of an ethnobotanical investigation, aimed at making a thorough comparison between past and current phytotherapy knowledge in this territory. The field investigation was conducted through semi-structured interviews. All data collected was entered in a database and subsequently processed. A diachronic comparison between the field results, the manuscript, and a 20th century book was then performed. A total of 109 interviews were conducted and the use of 103 medicinal plants, belonging to 46 families, was noted. A decrease in number of plant taxa and uses was observed over time, with only 42 taxa and 34 uses reported in the manuscript being currently known by the people of the valley. A thorough comparison with the remedies in the manuscript highlighted similar recipes for 12 species. Specifically, the use of agrimony in Valle Imagna for the treatment of deep wounds calls back to an ancient remedy against leg ulcers based on this species. The preliminary results of this study allow us to outline the partial passage through time fragments of ancient plant-based remedies once used in the investigated area.

Cartographic erasure of landscape as a social concept: Changes in ancient rural practices and land-use policy behind the study of toponyms. A case study from Sardinia

As a form of territorial cultural heritage, toponyms can reveal priceless information about landscape changes and its social construction by local inhabitants’ knowledge. This research analyses ancient and contemporary toponyms in Sa Serra region, a vast Quercus woodland in central Sardinia, aiming at: i) recovering the background of the creation process of landscape perception ii) understand its subsequent vanishment due to changes in land use policies. Among the 190 analysed toponyms, a diachronic comparison among maps and old documents, in the light of historical events related to land property modifications in the feudal system, shows the vanishment of a great number of toponyms related to daily rural routines, replaced by owners’ names or simply reduced to mere indication of steady geographical elements. Such evidences reveal the dimming of the local perception in favour of institutional up-down view in the naming process of the land.

Objectives and Related Requirements of College English Teaching: A Comparative Textual Analysis of College English Curriculum Requirements and College English Teaching Guidelines (2020 Version)

In order to explore the longitudinal development of the objectives and their related requirements of college English teaching in the last nearly two decades in China, the author adopting the methods of literature reading and textual analysis, draws a diachronic comparison between the College English Curriculum Requirements and the College English Teaching Guidelines(2020 version). Through careful reading and analyzing, the key findings are that at least three-aspect similarities and differences respectively exist in the two documents. For the similarities, the teaching objectives and their related requirements in the two documents both reflect the value orientation of instrumentality, the attention to students’ autonomous learning as well as their comprehensive cultural literacy and the classification of three-level teaching requirements. However, as to the differences, firstly, special attention has been paid to the cultivation of students’ listening and speaking skills in the teaching objectives of the Curriculum Requirements, while humanity in the teaching objectives of the Guidelines(2020 version) has increasingly become a major value orientation; additionally, an overall description of three-level teaching requirements has been made in the Guidelines(2020 version) apart from the individual description of each language skill; lastly, the numbers have been taken full advantage of to quantify English proficiency(five basic language skills) of three levels in teaching requirements of the Curriculum Requirements. Drawing on these findings, some corresponding suggestions are provided with in this paper.

Tvorba interaktivních map v projektu Prameny Krkonoš

The study presents the introductory work, development and creation of interactive maps, which are one of the results of the Historical Sources of the Giant Mountains project. The goal was to present the newly collected statistical data and previously unused map materials in digital form in a shape that would be accessible to the widest possible range of users and at the same time provide sufficiently deep insight for professional researchers. The result is two freely available maps documenting the development of the Krkonoše region during the 20th century. The first focuses on changes in the structure of the population, the second on changes in the structure of the economy and transport infrastructure of the region. Both maps enable comparative visualization of various types of statistical data against each other and at the same time a diachronic comparison of the development in question in chronologically organized time layers representing the logical periodization of the history of the region. The third map provides users with information on the location and types of various kinds of sources for the study of the history of the Krkonoše Mountains.

Comparative Constitutional Law: new approaches, concepts and categories (All-Russian the “Round Table”)

On April 18, 2023 the Institute of State and Law of the RAS hosted the All-Russian the “Round Table” “Comparative Constitutional Law: new approaches, concepts and categories”. It was attended by representatives of leading Russian scientific and educational institutions, as well as researchers from Belarus and Uzbekistan. The “Round Table” examined a wide range of problems related to modern trends in the development of Comparative Constitutional Law, new concepts of constitutionalism, constitutional reforms, synchronous and diachronic comparison of constitutional institutions, comparative research of human rights, the use of comparative methodology in the practice of national and supranational judicial bodies.

Quantitative botanical characterization of Saragolla wheat landraces from Abruzzo and Puglia Regions of Italy

AbstractSince the 1600s, a pasta wheat locally known as Sargolla, Saragollio or Saragollo has been cultivated in central and southern regions of Italy, including Abruzzo and Puglia. To identify if distinctive Saragolla landraces are present in Abruzzo and with a view to registering them as Conservation Varieties in the Abruzzo Regional Register of Genetic Resources, a quantitative botanical characterization of 11 farm-saved seed samples from Abruzzo and a previously defined Saragolla landrace from Puglia was performed. All twelve samples were grown for two years at the CREA-CI field station in Foggia, Puglia (Italy), and were morphologically characterized according to the criteria used by the botanist Johan Percival in 1921. In the 12 samples, we identified 9 taxonomically different botanical types, the most frequent of which were the italicum (32%), found in every population from Abruzzo. The leucurum and the affine were the main components of the previously defined Saragolla from Puglia. Results of the multivariate analysis indicated that the samples collected from farms in Abruzzo are more similar to each other than to the landrace of Saragolla from Puglia and support the registration of a specific Saragolla landrace for the Abruzzo region. The diachronic comparison of the botanical diversity of the currently cultivated Saragolla, with that observed in Sicily and Algeria at the beginning of 1900, suggests that a high degree of genetic diversity still exists in the 11 Saragolla populations from the Abruzzo Region.

Rebel governance or governance in rebel territory? Extraction and services in Ndélé, Central African republic

ABSTRACT Rebel governance assumes a symbiotic relationship between coercion and public goods provision. However, in the rebel-held town of Ndélé, Central African Republic, we find that governance happens in rebel-held territory, but rarely by rebels. Rebels allowed other actors to provide services for the people only when this did not hinder rebels extracting political clout and economic benefit from the people and their lands. We show how rebels’ extractive ambitions and governance discourses evolved during successive stages of rebellion through a diachronic comparison rooted in multimethod fieldwork from 2018 to 2022. We ask, why were rebel groups able to set up their rule, then rule for seven years, before ultimately losing power? Rebels evoked public goods at the onset of rebellion to justify the use of coercive means. After rebel rule was established, rebels outsourced public goods to international and state actors allowing for governance in rebel-held territory while focussing their own efforts on extraction. When their rule was challenged, rebels targeted governance actors and spaces in their territory in pursuit of economic gain and political dominance. Our findings call for a re-evaluation of existing rebel governance studies and the ways in which rebel groups are engaged with.

Culture and Explicitness of Persuasion: Linguistic Evidence From a 51-Year Corpus-Based Cross-Cultural Comparison of the United Nations General Debate Speeches Across 55 Countries (1970-2020)

The explicitness of expression or persuasion has been a critical subject of study in cross-cultural studies. The majority of cross-cultural comparisons in this respect, however, have been based on questionnaires and surveys. This study seeks to diversify the methods and validate the results with a corpus-based register analytical approach. Based on the United Nations General Debate Corpus (UNGDC) that comprises comparable multi-cultural speeches, a diachronic comparison (1970-2020) is made between the 2518 speeches (altogether 7,090,221 tokens) of 55 cultures from the East (East, South, and Southeast Asia) and the West (European Union, North America, and Australia) on the dimension ‘explicitness of persuasion’, a synthesized variable operationalized with 6 linguistic features, with the register analytical framework of Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA). The potential impacts of the political contexts on the cross-cultural gap in persuasion explicitness are tentatively discussed with the case studies on China and the United States. The results reveal significant difference between the exemplars from the East and the West on the overtness of persuasion, and the gap is generally narrowing down over the 51 years. The quantitative results provide political-setting linguistic evidence for the relevant findings of Hall, Hofstede, and Inglehart & Welzel, and the narrowing gap between cultures from the East and the West in the explicitness of expression points to an open and dynamic view of cultures. This study may offer implications for further research on the cultural styles of political persuasion.

Reconstructing the Phonology of Jakun Language Vowels: A Diachronic Phonological Analysis with Proto-Malay

This study discusses the Jakun language spoken by the Jakun Orang Asli community in the state of Johor. The objective of this study is to describe the process of vowel phonology of the Jakun language by comparing it with the process of vowel phonology of the Proto-Malay language that has been reconstructed by Adelaar (1992). This diachronic comparison is done to get the true phonological form of the Jakun language. This objective was achieved by using the rule ordering theory by Chomsky and Halle (1968). Next, this study uses a descriptive qualitative method to describe the collected field data. The results of this study have shown the true form of vowel phonology of the Jakun language in the state of Johor. Among the new findings of this study is the rejection of the statement by Carey (1976), who considers that the Jakun language has now lost its original nature and borrows Malay vocabulary only. This study has also found that the Jakun language does not borrow from the Malay language, but it is one of the branches of the Malay language, namely the Proto-Malay language. In addition, one of the new findings in this study is that there are vowels in the Jakun language that became nasal due to the process of regressive vowel induction. This phenomenon is considered special because the vowels in the closed syllable before the nasal and pharyngeal consonants at the end of the word receive nasal features from the nasal and pharyngeal consonants backwards. The existence of this regressive vowel origin can be said to be a new discovery in this study because this phonological process does not occur in standard Malay yet exists in other dialects, such as the Pattani Gerik dialect. The results of this study are expected to be a starting point for more research on the Jakun language elsewhere and on other Orang Asli languages.

Tourism, commodification of Dongba script and perceptions of the Naxi minority in the linguistic landscape of Lijiang: a diachronic perspective

Abstract Ongoing debates in the field of sociolinguistics are centred around the implications of the commodification of the languages and cultures of ethnic minorities. Previous research has adopted synchronic approaches to describing how ideologies of tourist consumption shape language choices in the linguistic landscape. However, such snapshot analyses have proved to be inadequate in revealing changes in the linguistic landscape over time, especially the nuanced perceptions of minority communities who are subjects to ethnic tourism. This paper examines the use of Dongba script in the linguistic landscape of the Naxi minority in Lijiang under the conditions of commodification in tourism. A diachronic comparison of photographic data collected in 2016 and 2021 revealed the increasing visibility and prominence of Dongba script on public signs; interviews with ordinary inhabitants, tourism industry practitioners and Dongba priests within the Naxi community further demonstrated the evolving attitudes towards linguistic commodification, from hesitation and objection to integration and creative accommodation. The study provides new insights into how a diachronic perspective can help reveal the dynamic between packaging languages as commodities and retaining signs of identity, religion and culture.