History Of Language Research Articles

I termini di colore nelle aree bianco, nero e grigio nella storia dell’italiano

"Colour Terms in the WHITE, BLACK and GRAY Areas in the History of the Italian Language. The present article is part of several studies that the authors have dedicated to the history of Italian colour terms. The Introduction illustrates some of the theses of Berlin, Kay (1969), with particular reference to the distinction between basic and non-basic terms. § 2 is dedicated to the Latin colour terms in the WHITE, BLACK and GRAY areas and their reflexes in the Romance languages. In § 3 the resources used for the research are presented. In §§ 3.1. (From Old Italian to the 19th century) and 3.2. (From the end of the 19th century to today’s Italian) the historical evolution and contemporary use of basic terms and other non-transparent colour terms are analyzed, also focusing on their figurative meanings and on the fixed collocations in which they occur. § 3.3. deals briefly with the terms formed by means of various morphological and syntactic devices that are most frequently used in Italian for the enrichment of the colour lexicon. Keywords: semantics, word-formation, colour terms, Italian "

Integrating Gestures and Words to Communicate in Full-Term and Low-Risk Preterm Late Talkers.

Young children use gestures to practice communicative functions that foster their receptive and expressive linguistic skills. Studies investigating the use of gestures by late talkers are limited. This study aimed to investigate the use of gestures and gesture–word combinations and their associations with word comprehension and word and sentence production in late talkers. A further purpose was to examine whether a set of individual and environmental factors accounted for interindividual differences in late talkers’ gesture and gesture–word production. Sixty-one late talkers, including 35 full-term and 26 low-risk preterm children, participated in the study. Parents filled out the Italian short forms of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB–CDI), “Gesture and Words” and “Words and Sentences” when their children were 30-months-old, and they were then invited to participate in a book-sharing session with their child. Children’s gestures and words produced during the book-sharing session were transcribed and coded into CHAT of CHILDES and analyzed with CLAN. Types of spontaneous gestures (pointing and representational gestures) and gesture–word combinations (complementary, equivalent, and supplementary) were coded. Measures of word tokens and MLU were also computed. Correlational analyses documented that children’s use of gesture–word combinations, particularly complementary and supplementary forms, in the book-sharing session was positively associated with linguistic skills both observed during the session (word tokens and MLU) and reported by parents (word comprehension, word production, and sentence production at the MB–CDI). Concerning individual factors, male gender was negatively associated with gesture and gesture–word use, as well as with MB–CDI action/gesture production. In contrast, having a low-risk preterm condition and being later-born were positively associated with the use of gestures and pointing gestures, and having a family history of language and/or learning disorders was positively associated with the use of representational gestures. Furthermore, a low-risk preterm status and a higher cognitive score were positively associated with gesture–word combinations, particularly complementary and supplementary types. With regard to environmental factors, older parental age was negatively associated with late talkers’ use of gestures and pointing gestures. Interindividual differences in late talkers’ gesture and gesture–word production were thus related to several intertwined individual and environmental factors. Among late talkers, use of gestures and gesture–word combinations represents a point of strength promoting receptive and expressive language acquisition.

Tuberculosis and Migrant Pathways in an Urban Setting: A Mixed-Method Case Study on a Treatment Centre in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, Portugal.

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease associated with poverty. In the European Union TB tends to concentrate in urban settings. In Lisbon, previous studies revealed, the presence of migrant populations from a high endemic country, is one of the risk factors contributing to TB. To better understand TB in foreign-born individuals in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, a mixed-method case study was undertaken on a TB treatment centre in a high-risk part of urban Portugal. Quantitatively, annual TB cases were analysed from 2008 to 2018, dividing foreign-origin cases into recent migrants and long-term migrants. Qualitatively, we explored recent migrants’ reasons, experiences and perceptions associated with the disease. Our results showed that foreign-born individuals accounted for 45.7% of cases, mainly originated from Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Cabo Verde. TB in recent migrants increased over the years for Angola and Guinea-Bissau, while for Cabo Verde TB cases were due to migrants residing in Portugal for more than 2 years. Recent migrants’ reasons to travel to Portugal were to study, to live and work, tourism, and seeking better healthcare. Visiting family and friends, historical links and common language were key drivers for the choice of country. Recent migrants and long-term migrants may present distinct background profiles associated with diagnosed TB.

Perception of Disease in Late Middle Ages and Rhetoric of Verbal Interaction with It (Based on the Material of Middle High German Medical Incantations of the 15<sup>th</sup> Century)

This article examines methods of verbal interaction with disease in Middle High German medical incantations on the material of three charms of the 15th century aimed at healing fever, apoplexy and purulent disease. The analyzed texts are of special interest since they have never been discussed in such types of research before and have never been translated into Russian, whilst they may provide some useful material for typological studies within the German charm literature as well as within the Germanic and Indo-European traditions. In addition, they demonstrate a characteristic mixture of the old pagan and new Christian mentality, in which disease (and, therefore, the fear of death) is depicted as an element of the gloomy archaic Lower World (represented, however, by the Devil), and the hope of salvation (healing) is associated with miraculous power of Christianity (that is, monotheistic religion), represented by the names of Jesus Christ, Virgin Mary and the holy evangelical apostles. Thus, Christian authorities and relics occupy the place of the old pagan Upper World in this hybrid picture of the world, manifested in incantations. All the texts are printed in the original in the transcription by V. Holzmann (Holzmann V. “Ich beswer dich wurm und wyrmin…”: Formen und Typen altdeutscher Zaubersprüche und Segen. Bern, 2001, 322 S.) with our translation into Russian and necessary comments. In this article we speculate upon the specifics of the perception of disease in Medieval German charms as heterogeneous and hostile substance originated in the Lower World and propose our typology of Middle High German medical incantations, which is based on three main types of communicative strategies supplied with text examples. The conclusions arrived at may interest specialists in the German language history and literature as well as folkloristic, culture studies and medicine of the Middle Ages.

Linguistic Data on the Formation of the Kazakh Literary Language

The article deals with the linguistic data that are based in the formation of the Kazakh literary language. The role of dialects, professional and borrowed words in the language is mainly considered. The main direction of research is the nature of words in these areas, their role in the formation of the literary language. When analyzing the research, they are guided by the views of scientists who analyzed and studied the Kazakh literary language, and their conclusions are considered as the main stage of the study. The volume of vocabulary of each branch is analyzed and its features are noted. It is aimed at describing the place of dialect words in the literary language, revealing that professional words are a branch of the literary language, as well as determining the role of borrowed words in our language and their place in the vocabulary. And it turns out the influence and necessity of each of them on the literary language. The internal and external structural changes of motivated words, the semantic nature of which is etymologically substantiated, the content of the stabilized form are considered. The influence of dialects, professional and borrowed words on the basis of the literary language, its enrichment and artistic expressiveness, as well as the development of vocabulary are also widely analyzed. As a result, it is noted that the words in this area have national usage, reflecting the breadth of the language, and it is argued that such words are one of the main aspects in the history of the Kazakh literary language.

Digital processing of dialectal texts published in Chisinau in the years 1969–1987

The dialectal texts published in Chisinau in the years ‘60–‘80 of the past century are of particular importance for research in different fields of science: linguistics (especially dialectology, the history of the Romanian language, stylistics), history, ethnography, folklore studies, sociology, psychology, ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics. Revitalizing them through digital processing and transliteration from the Cyrillic script into the Latin script will allow their full exploration. Currently, from the six volumes of the collection Dialectal Texts: Supplement to the Moldavian Linguistic Atlas, the first volume has been scanned, recognized, and transliterated resulting in the Latin script text. A set of the accompanying items (recognition templates, the user alphabet, and the spelling dictionary) have been prepared to automate the process. Based on the established transliteration rules, a converter was developed to convert the recognized text of the Romanian local speech samples from the Cyrillic-based phonetic transcription into the Latin-based one.

A Diachronic Study on ‘Литературный Язык’ in Relation to Korean ‘Standard Language’ and ‘Literary Language’

After the establishment of diplomatic relations between Korea and Russia in the 1990s, departments of Russian studies were founded at many universities, and Russian studies research was expanded and subdivided into various fields, and the quality of research rose to a considerable level. However, the scope of research in the history of the Russian literary language field is not wide and the research results and achievements are insignificant compared to other fields of Russian studies. Nevertheless, I think that it is time to organize the research results for the next generation of academics, and as a first step, I would like to address the problem of the Korean translation of the Russian term ‘литературный язык(ЛЯ, literary language)’. This paper, which focuses on the process of the development and the historical background of the formation of the relationships “signified-signifier” of the Russian ‘ЛЯ’ and the Korean “standard language” in the aspect of the Korean translation, asserts the following: First, in the history of Russian language, “Simple Russian” of the Peter the Great period in the 18th century is the embryo of the modern linguistic concept literary language. Second, through the 18th, the early and mid-19th century, “Simple Russian” came to form the characteristics of the nation’s literary language. Third, we cannot apply the concept of literary language to any of the language types of old Russian. Fourth, the signifier for the term literary language, which appeared in the mid-19th century with the meaning “language of literature”, gradually expanded, and deviated from the signified-signifier relationship at the beginning of its formation, but the signified does not change even in the present when the first signifier is not recognized. Fifth, for the translation of the term ЛЯ, the signified of the individual language closest to the signifier of ЛЯ should be selected. The Korean equivalent of the ЛЯ is a standard language, so it is reasonable to transfer ЛЯ to a standard language. Sixth, “history” is considered from a retrospective point of view from the point of origin or roots of the present to the present. Therefore, even if the ИРЛЯ begins in the 10th century when the ЛЯ did not exist, it is reasonable to translate it into the history of the Russian standard language.

Baby Sign Language in the development of young hearing children: A review of selected studies

The aim of this theoretical article is to increase the cognitive value of the subject of Baby Sign Language, in particular their positive impact and significance for the development of a hearing child. Addressing this problem seems important because of constant interest in sign language for children, both among parents and scientists. Equally important is the argument of the lack of a sufficient number of Polish studies in this area. The article consists of a short introduction and four thematically and logically arranged parts. The first contains a synthetic description of the process of language acquisition and development as well as the communication of a young child. The second part presents the history of the Baby Sign Language, its basic assumptions and principles. The third part discusses the importance and benefits of using the Baby Sign Language in the development of a young child. The study ends with a short summary with final conclusions, which show, based on the presented empirical material, that the Baby Sign Language has a positive significance for the child's development in almost all its spheres, i.e. e.g. in the linguistic, cognitive, emotional and motor spheres.

Abstract Machine of the Programming Language for Educational Purposes SYNCHRO

The article is devoted to a number of solutions for organizing work with memory in educational languages and programming systems aimed at teaching the preparation of multi-threaded programs over shared memory. The consideration was carried out within the framework of the SYNCHRO programming language for educational purposes, which made it possible to analyze variants of such solutions without the limitations typical for traditional manufacturing tools and devices of standard programming systems. The article gives a clear formulation of an abstract machine and a diagram of a command system that allows you to define the behavior of a program as a distributed system from a number of threads interacting in terms of access to the values of variables located in shared memory. The de-vice of shared memory and mechanisms of access to it by individual processes, which are a sequence of command execution, some of which are requests to shared memory, are described. The focus is on the convenience of debugging small programs used to introduce concurrency problems in the learning process, where the pace of learners’ under-standing of the problems is more important than achieving program efficiency and performance. The solution to this problem is useful when studying programming methods, as well as studying the history of programming languages, comparing programming paradigms, the potential of the schemes and models used, assessing the level of novelty of the programming languages being created, creating a technique for measuring different characteristics of programs on models and choosing criteria for the practicality of the created programs. When choosing a system of commands for an abstract machine, the principles of functional programming were taken into account as a popular paradigm at the stage of preparing prototypes and models of multi-threaded programs. From these principles, the conclusion is drawn of the consequences that allow you to successfully select elementary instructions that support working with memory in the style of data immutability and their transactional processing. For educational tasks in programming, the ability to ensure the correctness and completeness of solutions is more important than the efficiency and productivity of the received programs. This is the path to building reliable and secure software.

Bilingual experience affects white matter integrity across the lifespan

Bilingualism has been associated with increases in compensatory mechanisms to age-related neurocognitive decline thus delaying dementia symptom onset and leading to a more favorable trajectory of neurocognitive aging. However, most research to date has examined bilingualism-induced effects on neurocognition within older age ranges or young adults – with middle-aged individuals typically not being a population of interest. Furthermore, bilingualism is often treated as a dichotomous variable, despite it being a heterogeneous experience on an individual level. In the present study, we employed diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to examine whether bilingualism, and the degree of engagement in bilingual experience, modulates the nature or rate of white matter decline associated with aging. DTI data and language history data were collected from a cohort of monolingual and bilingual individuals spanning a wide age range. Two separate analyses were run. First, generalized additive models were run on matched monolingual and bilingual samples, examining effects of age on the trajectory of white matter integrity and how bilingualism modulates this effect. This analysis revealed a significant effect of age within the monolingual group for fractional anisotropy values in the right superior longitudinal fasciculus. However, the age effect within the bilingual group was not significant, indicating a faster decline in white matter integrity within the monolingual cohort. Second, general linear models were run on the entire participant sample, examining an interaction between age and degree of bilingual engagement on white matter integrity. Results from this analysis indicate that increased engagement in bilingual language use across the lifespan correlates with a slower decline in white matter integrity with age. Together these results indicate bilingualism, and specifically degree of bilingual engagement, impacts the trajectory of age-related decline in white matter integrity across the lifespan.

Politics and poetics of witnessing: Choman Hardi and Nazand Begikhani’s poetry of witness in English

ABSTRACT This study is a reading of selected poems of Choman Hardi and Nazand Begikhani—two Kurdish-Iraqi poets—from their collections of poetry in English. It approaches these poems by classifying them as ‘poetry of witness’, a term coined by Carolyn Forché for the poetry that is written after an experience of extremity or in response to an experience of extremity. Drawing on Forché’s (1993; 2011; 2014) theory of poetry of witness as well as Elleke Boehmer’s (2018) position on poetics of trauma and terror in postcolonial writings, this study attempts to investigate both the politics and poetics of witnessing in Hardi and Begikhani’s poetry in English and explores why and how these two poets have borne witness to their experiences and Kurdish traumatic history in a new language and for a new reader. The analysis this study provides will also reveal how poetry bears witness and how it acts as testimony; it identifies the characteristics and literary/aesthetic properties of poetry that make it a particularly powerful means of testimony, expression, and communication.

The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry. By David-Antoine Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. viii+390.

<i>The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry</i>. By David-Antoine Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. viii+390.

Bilinguals’ speech perception in noise: Perceptual and neural associations

The current study characterized subcortical speech sound processing among monolinguals and bilinguals in quiet and challenging listening conditions and examined the relation between subcortical neural processing and perceptual performance. A total of 59 normal-hearing adults, ages 19–35 years, participated in the study: 29 native Hebrew-speaking monolinguals and 30 Arabic-Hebrew-speaking bilinguals. Auditory brainstem responses to speech sounds were collected in a quiet condition and with background noise. The perception of words and sentences in quiet and background noise conditions was also examined to assess perceptual performance and to evaluate the perceptual-physiological relationship. Perceptual performance was tested among bilinguals in both languages (first language (L1-Arabic) and second language (L2-Hebrew)). The outcomes were similar between monolingual and bilingual groups in quiet. Noise, as expected, resulted in deterioration in perceptual and neural responses, which was reflected in lower accuracy in perceptual tasks compared to quiet, and in more prolonged latencies and diminished neural responses. However, a mixed picture was observed among bilinguals in perceptual and physiological outcomes in noise. In the perceptual measures, bilinguals were significantly less accurate than their monolingual counterparts. However, in neural responses, bilinguals demonstrated earlier peak latencies compared to monolinguals. Our results also showed that perceptual performance in noise was related to subcortical resilience to the disruption caused by background noise. Specifically, in noise, increased brainstem resistance (i.e., fewer changes in the fundamental frequency (F0) representations or fewer shifts in the neural timing) was related to better speech perception among bilinguals. Better perception in L1 in noise was correlated with fewer changes in F0 representations, and more accurate perception in L2 was related to minor shifts in auditory neural timing. This study delves into the importance of using neural brainstem responses to speech sounds to differentiate individuals with different language histories and to explain inter-subject variability in bilinguals’ perceptual abilities in daily life situations.

Where r you going? A typology of long-distance metathesis of liquids

This paper offers a typological analysis of the diachronic phenomena of long-distance metathesis of liquids that thrive in the history of several Romance languages. In particular, it explores metathesis of liquids from a non-initial consonant-liquid configuration towards the left periphery of the word, which may be accompanied by metathesis of post-vocalic liquids and be subject to locality restrictions, i.e. limitations with respect to the distance the migrating liquid may travel. Different combinations of the above possibilities yield four different typological categories, three of which are attested. Crucially, although existing models have offered insightful accounts of the phenomena at hand from a language-specific angle, there lacks a comprehensive understanding of the factors that determine the bigger typological picture. The present proposal, couched within Property Theory (Alber &amp; Prince 2015, in prep.), aims at successfully generating all attested patterns by extracting the crucial ranking conditions that define the typology of long-distance metathesis. The cornerstones of the analysis are two constraint rankings that trigger/block metathesis from a post-consonantal and a post-vocalic environment, respectively, a ranking imposing/lifting locality restrictions, and a ranking determining the least tolerated marked structure in a given language, choosing between a non-initial post-consonantal liquid and a post-vocalic one.

«РУСЬКА» КАНЦЕЛЯРСЬКА МОВА У ВЕЛИКОМУ КНЯЗІВСТВІ ЛИТОВСЬКОМУ: ФОРМУВАННЯ, ДЕРЖАВНИЙ СТАТУС, ДІАЛЕКТНІ ВПЛИВИ

Using a complex analysis of linguistic, historical and archeological sources, the author arrives at the conclusion, that the linguistic situation in the Grand Principality of Lithuania (GPL) was determined by political as well as ethno-genetic factors. The article emphasizes that the Belarusian ethnos was formed on the basis of two mutually independent linguistic complexes: the South-Western (Polissian) complex within the present-day Northern supradialect of Ukrainian and the South-Western dialect of Belarusian, on one hand, and, on the other, the North-Eastern one, made up of the Polotsk and Smolensk Krivichs mentioned in chronicles, whose ancestors had been Western Slavs migrating from the Southern Baltic region. Therefore it is the author’s contention that at a certain period in the history of the GPL, contrary to what Belarusian scholars claim, there were not two varieties of the standard written language common to all the principality; rather, there existed two official languages: an older one, namely, the Krivich language (existing from the early 14th c., when the Polotsk region was annexed to the GPL, till the late 16th c.) and a more recent one, the «Rusian» language, i.e. the Belarusian-Ukrainian one, which emerged at the end of the 14th c. — in the first three decades of the 15th c., when, during the reign of the Grand Prince Vytautas (1392–1430), the princely and regional chancelleries were established. A detailed account is given by the author of the history and functioning of the both languages. During the 16th c., the Krivichs language gradually lost all its distinctive features, turning into a provincial variety of the official «Rusian» language. The latter’s formation was greatly influenced by the language of Volhynian chancelleries, whose scribes could freely travel throughout the entire territory of the GPL (often with their magnates) and so inadvertently disseminated their vernacular’s features in official documents. On the contrary, the influence of Galician and Central Ukrainian chancelleries was, in the author’s opinion as well as most historians’ view, not essential.

Words Versus Pictures: Bilingual Performance on Verbal and Pictorial Measures of Executive Functions.

This study examined bilinguals' performance on functional executive function map tasks such as the Zoo Map from the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome and the extent to which working memory, set-shifting, and inhibition measures predicted bilinguals' performance on these tasks. Additionally, we explored the utility of pictorial map tasks as a measure of complex executive function in bilinguals. We hypothesized that bilinguals would perform better on the pictorial map tasks due to the reduced language processing demand. The analyses included 131 bilingual young adults who completed a comprehensive language history questionnaire, an English proficiency test, a battery of working memory and executive function tasks, and verbal and pictorial map tasks. Contrary to predictions, bilinguals' performance on the verbal maps did not differ significantly from that on the pictorial maps. Two multiple regression models significantly predicted performance on the verbal and pictorial maps, accounting for 7%-25% of the variance in the map scores. Working memory and interference control were the most prominent predictors within these models. In our study, bilinguals' performance on the verbal maps did not differ significantly from that on the pictorial maps. Additionally, English proficiency did not correlate with the participants' verbal map scores. These results suggest that executive function map tasks (e.g., the Zoo Map) are a useful clinical tool for assessing executive function in bilinguals. The findings of this study are discussed in light of the current literature on executive functions in bilinguals.

Linguodidactic Potential of Diachronic Data in Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language in Chinese Universities

The article is devoted to the study of the prospect of introducing knowledge of the history of the Russian language in the teaching of Russian as a foreign language in China. This article reports the main results of a survey of teachers and students and testing in Russian morphology, specially compiled for the current study. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the mechanism of error origin and ways to overcome them.

НАЗВАНИЯ ЗА ЖИЛИЩЕ В БЪЛГАРСКАТА ЕЗИКОВА КАРТИНА ПРЕЗ СРЕДНОВЕКОВИЕТО / NAMES FOR LIVING PLACES IN THE BULGARIAN LANGUAGE PICTURE OF THE WORLD IN THE MIDDLE AGES

This study presents the linguistic and semantic realizations of the concept of living places in the Old Bulgarian classical and original works from the 9th – 11th centuries and in the works of Patriarch Euthymius. A system of words and collocations and their use in different contexts are analyzed in view of their relation to Christian culture and the medieval picture of the world. The author traces the process of enrichment of the names for living places and the changes in the conceptual content of the studied words and collocations. Keywords: names for living places, medieval conceptosphere, history of the Bulgarian literary language

Translation Alignment with Ugarit

Ugarit is a public web-based tool for manual annotation of parallel texts for generating word-level translation alignment. We aimed to develop a user-friendly interactive interface to visualize aligned texts and collect training data in the form of translation pairs to be used later, (i) for training an automatic translation alignment system for historical languages at the word/phrase level, (ii) as a gold standard to evaluate automatic alignment and machine translation systems. Ugarit is now widely used for learning new languages, especially historical languages, and as a reading environment for parallel texts. In the following sections, we present the related works and similar projects; then, we give an overview of the visualization techniques used to present the alignment results. Further, we explain how we could derive the translation graph from the aligned translation pairs. Finally, we discuss the usage limitations of Ugarit, possible improvements, and future development plans.

Cognate and meaning frequency effects on homonym processing

Purpose: This study investigated the influence of L1 co-activation and meaning frequency of homonyms on L2 lexical access of Brazilian Portuguese–English bilinguals during an L2 meaning decision task. Design: Eighty-four university students completed a meaning decision task—with cognate homonyms—a meaning recognition task, a Language History Questionnaire, and an L2 proficiency test. The meaning decision task was composed of 128 prime words followed by one out of three possible targets: related to the dominant meaning, related to the subordinate one, or unrelated. Independent variables were cognate status (64 cognate × 64 non-cognate words), homonym status (64 homonym × 64 non-homonyms), prime-sharedness (16 dominant meaning shared words × 16 subordinate meaning shared words), and target-relatedness (64 related to dominant meaning × 64 related to subordinate meaning × 64 unrelated words). Dependent variables were reaction times and accuracy. Data and analysis: Data were analyzed using linear mixed effect models in R. Findings: Results showed that, in this sample of bilinguals, processing of target words related to the meaning of the prime was confounded when primes were homonyms. In general, this interference was not decreased by the co-activation of cognate words across languages. Accuracy scores benefited from cognate status only when no ambiguity was present. Word processing was faster and more accurate when target words were related to the dominant meaning of the homonym prime, which shared this same meaning across languages. Originality: L1 co-activation via cognate words was not enough to decrease homonym interference effect in L2 word processing. Implications: This study lends support for a non-selective bilingual lexical access view and for frequency approaches during L2 word recognition. It also indicates limitations of the cognate facilitation effect.