Extra-linguistic Context Research Articles

Constructional schemas in variation

AbstractThis paper discusses constructional variation in the domain of contrastive negation in English, using data from the British National Corpus. Contrastive negation refers to constructs with two parts, one negative and the other affirmative, such that the affirmative offers an alternative to the negative in the frame in question (e.g.shaken, not stirred;not once but twice;I don’t like it – I love it). The paper utilises multiple correspondence analysis to explore the degree of synonymy among the various constructional schemas of contrastive negation, finding that different schemas are associated with different semantic, pragmatic and extralinguistic contexts but also that certain schemas do not differ from each other in a significant way.

Putting language back into ecological communication contexts

ABSTRACTLanguage is a multi-faceted form of communication. It is not until recently though that language research moved on from simple stimuli and protocols toward a more ecologically valid approach, namely “shifting” from words and simple sentences to stories with varying degrees of contextual complexity. While much needed, the use of ecologically valid stimuli such as stories should also be explored in interactive rather than individualistic experimental settings leading the way to an interactive neuroscience of language. Indeed, mounting evidence suggests that cognitive processes and their underlying neural activity significantly differ between social and individual experiences. We aim at reviewing evidence, which indicates that the characteristics of linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts may significantly influence communication – including spoken language comprehension. In doing so, we provide evidence on the use of new paradigms and methodological advancements that may enable the study of complex language features in a truly interactive, ecological way.

A More Explicit Framework for Evaluating Objectivity and (Inter)Subjectivity in Modality Domain

In this paper we propose a more explicit framework for definition and evaluation of objectivity and (inter)subjectivity in the modality domain. In the proposed operational framework, we make a basic distinction between the modality notions that serve an ideational function (i.e., dynamic modal notions) and those with an interpersonal function (i.e., deontic and epistemic evaluations). The modality notions with ideational and interpersonal functions are content and person-oriented, respectively. While all dynamic modal notions are characterized by objectivity, deontic and epistemic modal notions may display a degree of (inter)subjectivity depending on their embedding context. Our main claim is that (inter)subjectivity can hardly be argued to be the inherent property of certain modality forms and types, but rather it is essentially a contextual effect. We functionally-operationally define (inter)subjectivity as the degree of sharedness an evaluator attributes to an epistemic/deontic evaluation and its related evidence/deontic source. (Inter)subjectivity is realized by (at least) one or a combination of three contextual factors, viz. the embedding syntactic pattern, the linguistic context and the extralinguistic context of a modality marker. Since both descriptive and performative modal evaluations involve a degree of (inter)subjectivity, performativity, which refers to speaker’s current commitment to his evaluation, is viewed as an independent dimension within modal evaluations and plays no part in the expression of (inter)subjectivity.

ПЕДАГОГИЧЕСКАЯ КОНЦЕПЦИЯ ФОРМИРОВАНИЯ МЕЖКУЛЬТУРНОЙ КОМПЕТЕНЦИИ СТУДЕНТА ПРИ РАБОТЕ С ТЕКСТОМ В ПРОЦЕССЕ ЕГО ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНОЙ ПОДГОТОВКИ

In this article the author gives the analysis of dissertations in the field of cross-cultural competence, an educational potential of texts and the development of an interpretative activity of students. The author evaluates and analyses the situation in higher education and gives the grounds to the necessity to modernize it in a social and cultural field and to orient it on developing cross-cultural competence as the major factor of competitive performance of a modern man. The thematic justification is caused by onrush of science and technology together with transformations of the society into a post-industrial and information oriented one, by the transition of a technological era into a systemic and technological era and by changing the requirements to the man to be an active and free personality. In the first rate these changes demand a creative activity, creative consciousness to be developed so as to be able to work with a big flow of information. In this turn the author investigates a text ( educational, literary and so on) as a means of developing cross-cultural competence as an ability to communicate successfully with partners from different cultures in a extra linguistic and professional context. The author also gives thematic justification, deduces contradictions, gives the ground to the pedagogical perspective of developing cross-cultural competence of students while working with a text. In her pedagogical concept the author elaborates criteria, factors, conditions, backgrounds and descriptors of the process under study as well as deduces logical relations. The target audience is PhD candidates, researchers, lecturers at higher institutions, secondary school teachers.

Universal and Specific Components in the Article Semantics in Non-Distant Kindred Languages (in Relation to the Material of Parallel Texts)

The article presents the results of the study of articles’ functioning in English and French article analogues in articleless (Russian) language. The conducted scientific work includes the comparison of English and French articles and the peculiarities of their interaction with linguistic and extra-linguistic context by means of contrastive analysis. The semantic invariant of the article common to the considered article languages has been identified, the correlation of this invariant with the ways of referencing the noun in articleless languages has been substantiated. The materials of the article are of practical value for comparative study of languages of different degree of kinship and training of specialized specialists in the field of translation and translation.

Object and verbal codes in folk culture of Bosnian and Serbian Muslims

Object and verbal codes are analyzed from the point of view of communication between Muslim Slavs and the Christian Orthodox in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Communicative points of convergence of representatives of two different confessions are being researched on the basis of the data taken from the traditional calendar and folk mythology. Archaic features in the tradition of the Central South Slavic area are common to representatives of the two confessions, as indicated by the mutual vocabulary of traditional folk culture and the corresponding extralinguistic contexts.

Interpreting Phraseological Units in Contracts: The Case of Extended Term–Embedding Collocation

Extended units of meaning (Sinclair 2004) have been scarcely investigated thus far in legal phraseology with the exception of research into lexical bundles (Goźdź–Roszkowski 2006, 2011 ; Kopaczyk 2013 ; Breeze 2013 ; Tomankova 2016 ; Biel 2017). This paper is therefore an attempt to show that the Sinclairian wider– context– perspective may prove to be especially useful for the study of phraseological units in legal genre since it helps us to reveal their collocational framework, allowing both grammatical and phraseological patterns to emerge. The paper focuses on extended ‘term– embedding collocations’ (Biel 2014b) extracted from the English and Croatian comparable corpora of contracts by means of WordsmithTools 6.0 (Scott 2012). It highlights some of the most striking examples supporting the above hypothesis and it accounts for their interpretation by means of analysing the extralinguistic context of phraseological units in contracts. It may be suggested that this study represents an attempt to fill a gap in research on legal phraseology due to the fact that private legal documents tend to be largely underrepresented in this specialized phraseology. It may also be suggested that by focusing on extended units of meaning in legal Croatian the paper attempts to fill yet another gap in corpus– based studies of legal language, which tend to be largely Anglocentric. Finally, the paper may, apart from revealing the stability of legal phrasemes, also represent a useful resource for translator training since it offers the wider context of a term or an expression in contract language.

The Meaning of Mood – Embedded Clauses in Spanish as a Case in Point

Mental space theory is a cognitive framework that explains the interpretation of linguistic expressions: it explains how interlocutors get from input to output. Whereas in traditional semantics words are taken to possess a static, prefabricated meaning, cognitive frameworks take meaning to be the result of an interpretive process.This article explains how mental space theory can be used in an analysis of mood in embedded clauses in Spanish. It starts from the assumption that the meaning of mood is constructed by interlocutors in an interpretive process on the basis of information from the modal morphemes combined with information from the linguistic as well as the extra-linguistic context. The interpretive process is represented as a sequence of mental spaces which are linked and structured on the basis of information from language and context.

Krugman vs Garicano: Individual and Cultural Differences in the Rhetoric of two Economic Op-ed Writers

The present paper attempts to account for the rhetorical traits of two prestigious economists, who are also authors of economic op-eds: Paul Krugman and Luis Garicano, who write for a prestigious American newspaper, the New York Times, and for the renowned Spanish newspaper, El País, respectively. Through a contrastive study of a roughly 12-thousand-word corpus of either author, this analysis has attempted, on the one hand, to endeavor a qualitative analysis scrutinizing the formal, or lexical-semantic aspects, of their prose in terms of technical words, clichés and coinages, as well as the patterns of conceptualization of the metaphors they use to describe the economic crisis that is sweeping the Western world at large. The second part of the analysis has concentrated upon the interpersonality of the texts, at the pragmatic layer of the op-ed genre, thus covering the extra-linguistic context of the texts which have been scrutinized under the umbrella of metadiscourse. These two different, but complementary, levels of analysis have led to the conclusion that the authors’ styles depict two individual ways in which op-eds are written in the economic world, but that their styles also refl ect cultural and linguistic differences in the way columns are viewed in the English and Spanish languages.

LEKSIČKA KREATIVNOST U NADIMCIMA SVETSKIH TENISERA

Rad se bavi nadimcima prvih sto tenisera na rang listi Asocijacije teniskih profesionalaca od 2013. do 2015. godine. Opisani nadimci predstavljaju rezultat primene mnogobrojnih i raznovrsnih mehanizama leksičke kreativnosti na gotovo svim nivoima jezičke analize, a pogotovo na morfološkom, sadržinskom (semantičkom, stilističkom i pragmatičkom), fonološkom i ortografskom nivou. Produktivni postupci tvorbe reči kao što su slivanje i abrevijacija, morfosintaksička struktura nadimka kao imeničke sintagme, te nadimci obeleženi kao ameliorativni ili pejorativni predstavljaju samo neke od glavnih aspekata i ishodišta jezičke kreativnosti kojima nadimke dobijaju današnji najpoznatiji i najbolji svetski teniseri. Cilj rada jeste da ponudi analizu, opis i klasifikaciju nadimaka imajući u vidu kreativne potencijale jezika (engleskog i srpskog) na spomenutim nivoima jezičke analize, te time pokaže naučnu relevantnost jednog ovakvog istraživanja koje je zasnovano na korpusu od preko dve stotine nadimaka skupljanih iz različitih izvora u periodu od tri godine. Analiza je sprovedena kvalitativnom metodom, ogledajući se u deskripciji i klasifikaciji odabranih primera, prema kriterijumima relevantnim za odgovarajuće nivoe lingvističke analize. Očekuje se da istraživanje ponudi aktuelnu sliku leksičke kreativnosti u formiranju nadimaka, kako u engleskoj, tako i u srpskoj jezičkoj zajednici koja je u poslednjoj deceniji veoma aktivan činilac u svetu tenisa i svih njegovih propratnih pojava, pa tako i onih jezičkih.

Способы репрезентации мнения автора в немецком научном тексте: динамический аспект

The paper analyzes historical change in article in strategies and linguistic means of representation of authorial stance in German scientific texts of the 17th-19th centuries. The topicality of the research question is due to the growing interest in the evolution of discourse in general and of discursive patterns in specific spheres of communication, such as scientific communication in particular. The author also notes that discursive practices are characterized by “social indexicality” determining the relationship of linguistic content of the text with its extralinguistic context. The paper considers two basic types of authorial stance: epistemic stance, which expresses the estimated probability of a proposition, and affect related to attitudinal and emotional aspects of the authorial stance in a scientific text. The paper presents the analysis of the corpus including scientific works of German authors divided into three groups according to the time of their publication (texts of the 17th century, the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century respectively). As a result, the author identifies certain trends in the evolution of the ways to represent authorial stance. Thus, there is increasing variety and growing frequency of linguistic means expressing epistemic stance. It is shown that affective stance gradually changes its semantics from the general emotional attitude to the cognitive-oriented one. The author suggests that these trends can be interpreted as a manifestation of the principle of social indexicality describing the reflection of social and historical context in communicative-discursive practices. The trends presented in the paper may be considered as reflecting the processes of development of science as a social institution and the formation of a professional community.

The Attic particle μήν

The paper examines the various usages of the Attic particle μήν and proposes a unified analysis of its main function. I argue that the prevalent analysis of Wakker (1997) needs some important reconsideration when instances of μήν in Platonic dialogue are concerned. First, the particle can target not only the propositional content of a discourse act, but also its illocution (felicity conditions). Second, I propose ‘countering expectations or assumptions of the addressee’ as the basic value of the particle. Functions in terms of commitment are better seen as secondary side effects. Third, I argue that differences in the origin of the countered assumptions or expectations are a natural basis for distinguishing between attitudinal μήν (extra-linguistic context and/or previous words of the addressee) and discourse connective μήν (previous words of the same speaker). It follows from my analysis that strict categorical boundaries between these usages are not to be expected.

ФОРМАЛЬНЫЙ И КОНЦЕПТУАЛЬНО-СОДЕРЖАТЕЛЬНЫЙ АСПЕКТЫ ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКОГО ГИПЕРТЕКСТА

The article provides complex analysis of linguistic hypertext, namely commentaries in English or Russian to English literary texts. Linguistic hypertext is regarded as means of overcoming linguistic and extralinguistic communicative failures produced on various text levels. Effective comprehension of a text requires possession of linguistic and extralinguistic contexts which accounts for distinguishing formal and conceptual aspects of linguistic hypertext. Units of formal aspect are meant to bridge phonological, morphological, lexical-phraseological, syntactical and stylistic gaps provoked by linguistic discrepancies. Conceptual aspect includes units of literary and cultural background information which are supposed to neutralize differences in cultural worldviews. The number of commentary units related to the aspects is determined by such factors as address of both literary text and hypertext itself, objectives of a commentator and the manner of presenting information in a commentary. The analysis presented in the article enables to determine levels and aspects of a text most likely to produce communicative failures when reading a literary text.

Оксюмороним как семантическое единство противоположностей

An oxymoronimis is considered as a reflection of linguistic duality and a
 result of conceptual integration. An oxymoronimas as a result of a modern
 word creation and an oxymoron as a well-known stylistic device are
 compared structurally and semantically. The key semantic sign of an oxymoronim
 (a unity of contrasts) is singled out. In addition to that a possible
 definition of this notion is stated.On the one hand a cognitive dissonance
 of an oxymoron is underlined, on the other hand an attention is paid on the
 instability, diffusion and emergence of an oxymoronim’s semantics. It is obviously
 possible to interpret a lexical meaning of an oxymoronim by means
 of the following: extralinguistic and linguistic contexts of its appearance and
 functioning and this nomination’ssynonymic paroemias. Uniqueness of an
 occasional oxymoronimis is noted for the Russian lingvoculture in view of
 quantitative leveling of these linguistic novelties in the communicative space
 of the modern English language.

Disentangling Metaphor from Context: An ERP Study.

A large body of electrophysiological literature showed that metaphor comprehension elicits two different event-related brain potential responses, namely the so-called N400 and P600 components. Yet most of these studies test metaphor in isolation while in natural conversation metaphors do not come out of the blue but embedded in linguistic and extra-linguistic context. This study aimed at assessing the role of context in the metaphor comprehension process. We recorded EEG activity while participants were presented with metaphors and equivalent literal expressions in a minimal context (Experiment 1) and in a supportive context where the word expressing the ground between the metaphor's topic and vehicle was made explicit (Experiment 2). The N400 effect was visible only in minimal context, whereas the P600 was visible both in the absence and in the presence of contextual cues. These findings suggest that the N400 observed for metaphor is related to contextual aspects, possibly indexing contextual expectations on upcoming words that guide lexical access and retrieval, while the P600 seems to reflect truly pragmatic interpretative processes needed to make sense of a metaphor and derive the speaker's meaning, also in the presence of contextual cues. In sum, previous information in the linguistic context biases toward a metaphorical interpretation but does not suppress interpretative pragmatic mechanisms to establish the intended meaning.

La traducción entre lenguas afines en el discurso oral: el caso de algunos marcadores discursivos italianos de reformulación

The purpose of this contribution is to reflect on the translation of pragmatic markers in oral discourse and, in particular, on three Italian reformulation markers that present a rich variety of pragmatic values, as is the case of diciamo, insomma and cioe. We discuss the difficulty implied in the translation of these particles, the reasons of this difficulty, and the factors to be taken into account for translation (distribution, pragmatic functions, extralinguistic context, intonation) in order to attain an accurate translation, within the field of teaching Italian SL for Spanish speakers and translation of related languages. Within these markers, we will focus on the analysis of the translation of their non-prototypical values, that is, not so much on their metatextual values with a proper reformulation function, but on their metacommunicative and cognitive values, certainly more present in oral discourse.

Context as Achilles’ heel of translation technologies

The tools of translation memories and machine translation can be viewed as (not) being able to draw on different aspects of context that are relevant to a particular translation project, such as bilingual text, portions of a text, versions of a text, related text, or extralinguistic context. The aspects of context that the tools can indeed draw on and how well they do so highlight their most important benefits, whereas the aspects of context that the tools may fail to draw on reveal their weaknesses. In cases where, depending on the context, a piece of text being translated may have more than one meaning or a translation of a piece of text may be rendered in more than one way, the contexts the tools are able to draw on are critical. An analysis of different kinds of context in different applications highlights the circumstances in which users of TM and MT tools may risk accepting semantically and lexically undesirable output, as well as when TM tool users may risk inputting contextually inappropriate translations. Further, context is an important consideration when integrating MT output into TM tools. Although TM and MT technologies differ in how they produce translation output, end-users of both tool types may face similar contextual challenges.

Bridging the gap between DeafBlind minds: interactional and social foundations of intention attribution in the Seattle DeafBlind community.

This article is concerned with social and interactional processes that simplify pragmatic acts of intention attribution. The empirical focus is a series of interactions among DeafBlind people in Seattle, Washington, where pointing signs are used to individuate objects of reference in the immediate environment. Most members of this community are born deaf and slowly become blind. They come to Seattle using Visual American Sign Language, which has emerged and developed in a field organized around visual modes of access. As vision deteriorates, however, links between deictic signs (such as pointing) and the present, remembered, or imagined environment erode in idiosyncratic ways across the community of language-users, and as a result, it becomes increasingly difficult for participants to converge on objects of reference. In the past, DeafBlind people addressed this problem by relying on sighted interpreters. Under the influence of the recent “pro-tactile” movement, they have turned instead to one another to find new solutions to these referential problems. Drawing on analyses of 120 h of videorecorded interaction and language-use, detailed fieldnotes collected during 12 months of sustained anthropological fieldwork, and more than 15 years of involvement in this community in a range of capacities, I argue that DeafBlind people are generating new and reciprocal modes of access to their environment, and this process is aligning language with context in novel ways. I discuss two mechanisms that can account for this process: embedding in the social field and deictic integration. I argue that together, these social and interactional processes yield a deictic system set to retrieve a restricted range of values from the extra-linguistic context, thereby attenuating the cognitive demands of intention attribution and narrowing the gap between DeafBlind minds.

Prosodic Variation in Academic Public Presentations

The article reports on a study of the prosodic characteristics of academic public presentations. Prosodic variation is analysed with regard to the social and cultural context which is significant for the adequate description of discourse prosody. The paper draws on the findings made in the course of the analysis (auditory and acoustic) of presentations delivered by British lecturers. The article contains an overview of contextual factors and discourse strategies used in academic presentations. Special focus is given to prosodic variations in spoken discourse determined by the extralinguistic context. The author argues that that the choice of prosodic means depends on a variety of contextual parameters: speaker-audience relationships (reflected in the tenor of discourse), the speaker’s rhetorical competence, method of delivery, rhetorical tradition and others. The observations made in the paper may be useful to develop expertise in the delivery of academic public presentations which is an important aspect of EFL teachers’ professional training.

Toponym recognition in custom-made map titles

ABSTRACTThe titles of customized topographic maps constitute a specific corpus which is characterized by a very significant number of place names and spelling variations. This paper is about identifying toponyms in these titles. The toponym tracking is based on gazetteers as well as light parsing according to patterns. The method used broadens the definition of the toponym to include the nature of the corpus and the data in it. It consists of seven successive stages where both the extralinguistic context – in this case toponym georeferencing – and the linguistic context are taken into account. Mistakes in tagging are analyzed from the corpus characteristics and the results of each step tagging are evaluated (recall, precision, F-measure). Different conclusions can be suggested: (i) toponym recognition in web corpora should take into account spelling changes, (ii) toponym recognition cannot be limited to gazetteer proper nouns, (iii) the notion of subjective toponym is relevant in this specific corpus, and could be considered with reference to the customization of maps.