Individual Language Research Articles

Update about "minimally verbal" children with autism spectrum disorder.

ABSTRACTObjective:To review clinical and neurobiological features of minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder.Data source:We carried out a narrative review using the PubMed database. We considered the following search terms combined through the Boolean operator “AND”: “autism spectrum disorder”; “minimally verbal.”Data synthesis:To date, there is no shared definition of minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder. The heterogeneity in intellectual functioning and in linguistic abilities among these individuals suggests there is no single mechanism underlying their difficulties in learning to speak. However, the reasons why these children do not speak and the biological markers that can identify them are still unknown. Language impairment in these children can lead to several unfavorable consequences, including behavior problems (such as self-aggression, hetero-aggression, and property destruction), poorer daily living and social skills. Psychiatric comorbidities (including attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, specific phobias, and compulsions) consist in a serious problem related to the lack of verbal language in individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Although in the literature there are very few evidence-based results, several findings suggest that an alternative and augmentative communication intervention, creating an extra-verbal communication channel, may be effective in these individuals.Conclusions:The exact definition, clinical characteristics, associated disorders, etiology, and treatment of minimally verbal subjects with autism spectrum disorder must still be further studied and understood.

Conventions for unconventional language: Revisiting a framework for spoken language features in autism.

Autism has long been characterized by a range of spoken language features, including, for instance: the tendency to repeat words and phrases, the use of invented words, and "pedantic" language. These observations have been the source of considerable disagreement in both the theoretical and applied realms. Despite persistent professional interest in these language features, there has been little consensus around terminology, definitions and developmental/clinical interpretation. This review paper updates and expands an existing framework for unconventional language in autism to include a broader range of non-generative (echolalia and self-repetition) and generative (idiosyncratic phrases, neologisms and pedantic language) features often observed in the language of individuals on the autism spectrum. For each aspect of the framework, we review the various definitions and measurement approaches, and we provide a summary of individual and contextual correlates. We also propose some transitional language features that may bridge non-generative and generative domains (e.g., mitigated echolalia and gestalt language). This updated framework offers a unified taxonomy and nomenclature that can facilitate further investigation and interpretation of unconventional language in autism. There are important implications of this work for our understanding of the complex interplay between autism and language development. Equally important are the clinical ramifications that will guide evidence-based practice in assessment and intervention for individuals on the autism spectrum.

Названия калины (Viburnum) в финно-угорских языках

The paper discusses the folk names of guelder rose (Viburnum) in the Finno-Ugric languages, with more than a hundred phytonyms having been studied to reveal their origin, areal distribution, and the lexical nomination of Viburnum according to various features. Among the phytonyms studied, the Baltic-Finnish vocabulary noticeably prevails, probably due to the fact that the dialectal lexical material of Baltic-Finnish languages has been much better collected. The entire study was done from a comparative perspective. The majority of the Finno-Ugric names of guelder rose originated in separate languages and has no correspondences in the related tongues. Not more than two phytonyms belong to the ancient lexical fund. Moreover, in the languages under consideration, there are several names of guelder rose that were borrowed from Germanic, Turkic, and Slavic languages. The compound phytonyms formed in individual languages are numerous and rather diverse. The multiplicity of names given to guelder rose is more characteristic of herbaceous plants, with trees usually having far fewer names with more ancient origin. The Finno-Ugric names of guelder rose are based on a number of features, such as medicinal use, flower coloring, place of growth, and external similarity to other plants. The study has identified the lexical-semantic models by which the compound names of guelder rose were formed, with their components analyzed. Thus, each phytonym may contain two or three components. The names of guelder rose also include zoosemisms denoting various animals: a dog, a wolf, a pig, a partridge, and a crane.

Functional peculiarities of anaphoric units in the Japanese language system

This article is devoted to the analysis of the anaphoric usage of some Japanese units (copulas, nominalizers, demonstrative pronouns) at the semantic and syntactic levels. The study of anaphoric relations in the language in general and in individual languages in particular is of great interest to linguists conducting research in various areas of modern linguistics. Anaphora has been studied by functional linguists, cognitive linguists, psycholinguists, etc. Anaphoric relations have been described not only in the sentence, but also in the text. Now information about the use of anaphoric means at the level of discourse is considered to be one of the mandatory elements of a comprehensive description of the language or its pronominal system. Pronouns are given special attention, since they function as substitute words and help to make our speech more concise. Anaphoric demonstrative pronouns are used as connecting elements in the text and form intertextual links. They show that there is a predicate that identifies the previous and subsequent fragments of the utterance. Our approach can be characterized as an integral one. We attempt to present a complex description of the usage of anaphoric units in the Japanese language specifying their morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and communicative properties.

An Analysis of the Artistic Elements of TV Anchor in the Perspective of the Development of Modern Information Technology

TV anchor is a key profession in radio and television industry, and its artistic expression is of great practical significance to the development of the whole industry. In order to fully meet the needs of the current social development and the progress of the industry, we should, on the basis of improving the expression of individual language of TV anchorpersons, master the necessary communication and interaction skills, and integrate into the development features of modern information technology, improve the overall quality of the art of television broadcast hosting, effectively meet the public’s psychological expectations of television broadcast hosting. Based on the development of modern information technology, this paper makes a detailed analysis of the artistic elements of TV broadcasting.

READING IN THE CONTEXT OF INTEGRATED LANGUAGE DIDACTICS

The article is focused on the conceptual foundations of foreign language teaching in the multilingual environment of modern European society. Today’s societies are increasingly shaped by multilingualism, that forms the starting point for language policy and language didactic efforts aimed at putting multilingual-oriented teaching concepts into practice. Special emphasis is placed on the analysis of trends in foreign language teaching in European countries directed towards the formation of a multilingual identity. Based on the analysis of the papers of famous foreign scholars, a number of new conceptual ideas on foreign language teaching have been identified and analyzed, which are integrated into the framework of the so-called didactics of multilingualism, which is the methodological paradigm of modern foreign language teaching. It has been shown that the starting point of this concept is the interpretation of multilingualism as a unique communicative competence of the individual, an integrated system of linguistic and socio-cultural knowledge and skills that expands and deepens with the development of each new language. The article highlights the main principles of multilingualism didactics, under which existing linguistic and communicative knowledge, skills and abilities, individual language learning needs and rational use of previous language learning experiences are taken into account. The aim of this paper is to review the integrated didactic approach, which focuses on reading comprehension, in particular on the reconstruction of reference chains. Based on the results of psycholinguistic studies on the reading comprehension process as well as on the (multilingual) mental lexicon, it will be shown how a multilingual task can promote a networking of entries in the mental lexicon as well as a transfer of reading competence and grammatical competence.

“CORALINE” BY NEIL GAIMAN IN UKRAINIAN TRANSLATION: LEXICO-SEMANTIC ASPECT

The article deals with translation transformations application while fiction text translation. The purpose of the article is to study lexical-semantic transformations and their combinations which allow the translator to reproduce a foreign text as accurate as possible, taking into account the principle of similarities and differences of two languages. The research is based on “Coraline” by Neil Gaiman and its Ukrainian translation performed by O. Mokrovolskyi. The main scientific results are obtained applying a set of general scientific and special methods of research, namely: analysis and generalization of scientific literature on the problems of translation transformations; theoretical generalization, analysis and synthesis; comparative, descriptive, contrastive, and analytical methods. The authors consider the translation transformation as a tool, with the help of which it is possible to carry out a transition from units of the original to units of translation; and the essence of lexical-semantic transformations is in the replacement of the translated lexical unit with a word or word combination that realizes the sema of this unit of the source language. In the process of comparative analysis of the story “Coraline” by Neil Gaiman and its Ukrainian translation performed by O. Mokrovolskyi a lot of lexical-semantic transformation can be identified. Most often, the transformations of synonymous substitution, concretization of meaning, transcoding, transposition and descriptive translation are used, less often – generalization of meaning and compression. The results of the comparative analysis of the source text and the targeted text allow the authors to state that in order to achieve the closeness of the translation to the original text, it is necessary to find correspondences to the lexemes of the English language using complex translation transformations. The authors come to the conclusion that the lexical-semantic techniques of different languages have the same basis, but their functioning in the language is different. The same techniques perform different functions, have different degrees of application and different specific role in the system of each individual language, which explains the need for transformations.

The role of the hippocampus in statistical learning and language recovery in persons with post stroke aphasia

Although several studies have aimed for accurate predictions of language recovery in post stroke aphasia, individual language outcomes remain hard to predict. Large-scale prediction models are built using data from patients mainly in the chronic phase after stroke, although it is clinically more relevant to consider data from the acute phase. Previous research has mainly focused on deficits, i.e., behavioral deficits or specific brain damage, rather than compensatory mechanisms, i.e., intact cognitive skills or undamaged brain regions. One such unexplored brain region that might support language (re)learning in aphasia is the hippocampus, a region that has commonly been associated with an individual’s learning potential, including statistical learning. This refers to a set of mechanisms upon which we rely heavily in daily life to learn a range of regularities across cognitive domains. Against this background, thirty-three patients with aphasia (22 males and 11 females, M = 69.76 years, SD = 10.57 years) were followed for 1 year in the acute (1–2 weeks), subacute (3–6 months) and chronic phase (9–12 months) post stroke. We evaluated the unique predictive value of early structural hippocampal measures for short-term and long-term language outcomes (measured by the ANELT). In addition, we investigated whether statistical learning abilities were intact in patients with aphasia using three different tasks: an auditory-linguistic and visual task based on the computation of transitional probabilities and a visuomotor serial reaction time task. Finally, we examined the association of individuals’ statistical learning potential with acute measures of hippocampal gray and white matter. Using Bayesian statistics, we found moderate evidence for the contribution of left hippocampal gray matter in the acute phase to the prediction of long-term language outcomes, over and above information on the lesion and the initial language deficit (measured by the ScreeLing). Non-linguistic statistical learning in patients with aphasia, measured in the subacute phase, was intact at the group level compared to 23 healthy older controls (8 males and 15 females, M = 74.09 years, SD = 6.76 years). Visuomotor statistical learning correlated with acute hippocampal gray and white matter. These findings reveal that particularly left hippocampal gray matter in the acute phase is a potential marker of language recovery after stroke, possibly through its statistical learning ability.

Açık ve Uzaktan Öğrenme Ders Kitaplarının Değerlendirilmesi

Purpose: The present study aimed to investigate the compliance of ODE textbooks published by universities in and outside Turkey to textbook preparation criteria and identify the points that require improvement in those books. Methodology: A qualitative data analysis method known as document analysis was employed to achieve this. Using the convenience sampling method, the ODE textbooks published by 10 universities in and outside Turkey and were accessible online were determined as the sample of the study. The textbooks were evaluated based on the Open and Distance Education Textbook Evaluation Checklist, developed by a previous study. The checklist comprised 44 items distributed to four domains: individual learning, content, visual design, and language. Each item was scored based on the criterion's complete fulfillment, partial fulfillment, and non-fulfillment. Finding: The evaluation indicated that the textbooks showed good compliance to the criteria in terms of language and visual design while they needed improvement in the domains of individual learning and content, particularly in providing questions, examples, feedback sections, and in-text highlighting to improve the intelligibility of the content.

A diachronic explanation for cross-linguistic variation in the use of inverse-scope constructions

This study investigates the cross-linguistic variation in the use of inverse-scope constructions such as All that glitters is not gold for expressing "Not all X are Y" propositions. In particular, it seeks to explain why these constructions are in use and even common in some languages but lacking in others. It is argued that the cross-linguistic variation is explained by competition with alternative scope-transparent constructions, but only when the history of individual languages is taken into consideration. When a language develops a novel construction such as Not all that glitters is gold, which expresses scope relations transparently, it may take several centuries before this novel construction finally pushes a pre-existing inverse-scope construction out of use. In the meantime, inverse scope is used alongside its scope-transparent competitor. Thus, the universal bias for scope transparency has a weak synchronic effect, but it drives systematic historical developments across languages.

The concept of "Contemporary Dance": cultural, philosophical, and artistic approaches

The purpose of the article is to analyze and systematize approaches to the definition of the concept of "contemporary dance". Methodology. The research methodology is based on the analysis of scientific sources related to the topic, approaches to the interpretation of the concept of "Contemporary Dance", using terminological and historical methods. Scientific novelty. For the first time, the main approaches to the definition of contemporary dance are revealed and its characteristic features are revealed. Conclusions. Contemporary dance has taken a prominent place among the directions of choreographic art, has a wide circle of admirers, is recognized as a stage phenomenon and cultural and artistic practice. Currently, there is a wide range of approaches to understanding contemporary dance, which leads to terminological differences in scientific works. Among the main positions in contemporary dance, one can single out its consideration as an avant-garde form of choreographic art that evolved from modern dance; as a dramatic virtuoso dance originating from ballet and jazz; as an intellectual dance that originated in Europe and America, based on various techniques and techniques, it is perceived as a tool for the development of the dancer's body. We adhere to the position that contemporary dance is a direction of choreographic art that arose in the late XX – early XXI centuries in Europe and America, based on techniques and techniques that act as tools for the development of the body, the formation of awareness and the individual choreographic language of the dancer.
 Keywords: contemporary dance, contemporary culture, choreography, contemporary dance, terminological approach.

Román intézménynevek magyarítása Erdélyben

The study examines the translation methods used in the translation of institutional names and their common language use within the context of Hungarian-Romanian bilingualism in Transylvania, noting the language planning tasks that arise from minority status and the results of corpus design so far. The presented translation and language use phenomena emphasize that translating institutional names in minority status is a task for (professional) translation, terminology, and language planning. Within translation, it presupposes practical skills and a high level of bilingualism. In the technical and terminological context, the translation of the name of an institution presupposes an adequate knowledge of the individual fields and languages, in the absence of which unprofessional and ambiguous translations may be created. As a language planning problem, it primarily concerns corpus planning and presupposes the expansion of language rights related to status planning and expanding the scope of using vernacular languages.

Polska sieć komunikacyjna i jej główne osie

An inalienable property of the linguistic reality is the multi-language nature of the world and the multi-variation character of the ethnic-national communication space. As regards Polish pace, one can distinguish a series of axes around which the processes of long lasting concentrate. The author discusses the following five axes: (1) idiolectal (individual languages), (2) one determined by the dichotomy: spoken language – written language (contemporarily it assumes the form: spoken language – media language – written language), (3) one connected with the opposition: dialects – literary language (today in the form: dialects – mixed languages – general language), (4) functional variations (their ‘canonical’ series: colloquial language – scientific language – journalistic language – language of the administration – religious language – artistic language), and (5) one of three styles (high – medium – low).

“Appropriate” Meanings and American Traits in Webster’s 1828 Dictionary

During the eighteenth century, many philosophers were attempting to determine the origin of language and to develop a universal theory of linguistics, but a debate at the Prussian Royal Academy questioned the endeavour by claiming that languages have different origins and that it is impossible to explain the progress of human thought by studying them because national languages influence the way their speakers see the world. In answer to that, Webster proposes that all modern languages have a common divine origin and that the universal truth could be accessed by studying etymology. He claims that words have an “absolute” significance, which, due to the development of the different languages, assumed meanings that are “appropriate” to each individual language. This article proposes that nationalism in the American Dictionary of the English Language is not represented by a substantial number of Americanisms, but by giving “appropriate” meaning that evidences how “absolute” significances evolved and came to characterize the United States. The article provides evidence to support that Webster’s lexicographic contribution is constituted by the new organization he gives to the entries and by definitions that show how old terms came to represent new concepts when compared to those in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary.

LANGUAGE ORIENTATION AS AN ASPECT OF HUMAN ACTIVITY

The article is devoted to the research of a phenomenon of language orientation as aspect of human's language activity. The research revealed that language, being a phenomenon of human activity, exists as a set of individual subjective languages (private languages) and as universal objective language (general language). A codified and conventional model is general language; the set of individual ideas about language are private languages. The research showed that correlation between general and private languages forms individual's language experience. As a result of received and comprehended language experience the language orientation of language personality is formed. In turn, society exerts influence the personality by its language orientation in language area. The author determined that vectors of orientation are elements of inner permissive language structure of personality, formed and fixed by individual's language experience in the course of language socialization and social adaptation. Finally, it was concluded that language orientation presupposes the differentiation of language material to relevant and irrelevant. It may be conscious or unconscious. As a result, language experience and language orientation organize and control human's cogitative activity. It is important to understand that consistency and integrity of language orientation system are indications of stability and autonomy of language personality.

WUJUD PEMBELAJARAN PRINSIP KESANTUNAN BERBAHASA MAHASISWA PRODI PENDIDIKAN BAHASA DAN SASTRA INDONESIA

Abstract: This study discusses the form of learning to the principles of language politeness in the Indonesian Language and Literature Education Study Program Students, Universitas Muhammadiyah Makassar. This research was conducted in two stages, namely the data collection stage and the data analysis stage. The data collection stage was carried out through field research to obtain primary data using observation techniques and notes on the data card, while at the data analysis stage the authors used qualitative descriptive analysis. This analysis is used to obtain an overview of the form of maximizing the application of student conversations. The results obtained show that adherence to the principles of politeness is still a concern of students when speaking well with fellow students, especially towards lecturers. This indicates that the supporting factors for the realization of good communication are well understood and realized. The supporting factors are the conversation situation, the object being discussed, the individual language users involved, being able to see the appropriateness and accuracy of the use of vocabulary in the conversation. The use of maxims in conversation through the principles of language politeness put forward by Leech, including the maxim of wisdom, the maxim of acceptance, the maxim of generosity, the maxim of humility, the maxim of agreement and the maxim of sympathy.

Translanguaging: a pedagogical concept that went wandering

ABSTRACT The term translanguaging goes back more than a quarter-century, originating in the domain of the teaching of Welsh, but it has over the years developed a wide variety of usages. While translanguaging is claimed to have advantages over other language education models, many of its new interpretations, which take it some distance from its original pedagogical sense, are seen by some as problematic. The new conceptualizations go beyond the pedagogical practice of drawing on multiple language varieties in order to facilitate learning; they, indeed, often extend to general, overarching accounts of language deployment among multilinguals, which sometimes do not differentiate between individual language competencies. Proponents of translanguaging in its more traditional sense point to pedagogical advantages and opportunities it presents in the (language) classroom. Even in this context, however, there is debate about the appropriateness of utilizing translanguaging in, for example, minority language maintenance contexts. In this article, we explore the variety of uses of the term translanguaging and the attendant claims attached to them. Our conclusion is that the critical factor in the capacity of the term to retain coherence and intelligibility is the maintenance of constant awareness of and attention to the perspective in which it is applied.

Caregiver Support for Asian American Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias Caregivers: A Conceptual Synthesis

Informal caregiver support has been defined as different types of interventions. However, it has not been well explained in the social context and not well discussed as an integrative concept for dementia caregivers who are Asian Americans. Therefore, the aim of this study was to conduct a dimensional analysis--a type of evidence synthesis--to explore caregiver support in the context of Asian American dementia caregivers. A synthesis of 40 articles produced four interrelated dimensions of caregiver support: Individual (language, information, psychological issue, and culture); Family (family member support, availability of extended family, and decision making); Community (bilingual and bicultural help, and religion and spiritual source); and Professional healthcare system (expectations from healthcare professionals and caregivers for caregiver interventions, communication concordance, initiative in seeking help, and trust). The findings provide guidance for future studies on this population in promoting caregiver’s health and developing caregiver interventions.

Converb constructions in Mari and Udmurt

Uralic languages of the Volga-Kama Region, especially Mari and Udmurt, show strong Turkic influence in the range of usages of converbial (gerundial, i.e. adverbial non-finite) forms. Converbs can be found in combination with syntactically superordinate verbs communicating different values, mirroring Turkic structures: modal (“swimming know” = ‘know how to swim’), directional (“crawling leave” = ‘crawl away’), benefactive (“baking give” = ‘bake something for someone’), aspectual (“drinking send” = ‘drink up’). It is debatable however to what extent one can speak of grammaticalized structures and to what extent one should speak of a body of loan translations in individual languages or varieties. The paper explores the prospect of using verbs borrowed from Russian as a metric of productivity: as these were borrowed after the phase of intense Turkic language contacts ended, their usage in Turkic-type structures can been seen as evidence for their grammaticalization, while their absence in such structures can be seen as evidence against it.

Functional Aspects of Language Games in Political Discourse

The article analyzes various aspects of communication in political discourse. One of its major arguments says that politicians who disrespect major rules of communication violate the basic principles of interaction, namely in that they introduce their own new patterns of language games. Adequate principles of interaction are an indispensable requirement for political discourse as such in that they guarantee efficient communication and help avoid conflicts. Such principles are based on general rules of communication. The article underlines the importance of a structual logical chain of political communiction along the following lines: intention – strategy – tactic – means of realization. In general, human beings acquire languages according to basic linguistic forms and models. Тhe Austrian philosopher L. Wittgenstein introduced the term “language game”. In a similar vein, the Swiss linguist F. de Saussure established a link between language and the sphere of games in that he compared the systems of natural languages to the rules of chess. The language games of political discourse are represented by imperative intentions, emotive senses and various means of the manipulative use of linguistic units; they usually focus on factors of impact. The article discusses the intentions of language games as a point of activization of cognitive and communicative activities for the achievement of goals related to strategies and tactics of politicians. The nature of these intentions exerts impact on the realization of the linguo-pragmatic potential of the functions of perlocutionary linguistic acts (requests, orders, etc.). The perlocutionary functions of language are the basis of political manipulation which manifests itself as a systematic combination of traditional political instruments with contemporary communicative approaches to various aspects of the manipulative impact on political consciousness and behavior. Average citizens who react to political discourse automatically take part in broader intellectual and communivative activities; they also demonstrate their own participation in political processes. Therefore political discourse has an impact on the formation and development of civic society and its relations to the state. As a rule, politicians develop their communicative strategies along programs and platforms that are designed for central subjects of the political process (the government, political parties and leaders). This limited circle of addressees causes a certain lack of efficiency that should be corrected inasmuch as the ultimate goal of any communicative strategy should be a certain change of the addressee’s worldviews. Political tactic is an important component of political communicative technologies. Political communicative activities include various aspects of tactical measures and methods that start on a local level and go viral according to strategically devised lines. In this setting, specific political texts with their particular pragmatic implications appear to be units of political discourse with their own semiotic structure. Politicians create messages based on their world views and ideologies. The role of the addressee should be understood as a priority in political communicative acts that are usually characterized by polemics, a high degree of axiology and persuasiveness. The article focusses on linguistic tools that politicians use in order to manipulate the electorate. To influence the electorate, politicians use manipulative linguistic items on the lexical, idiomatic and metaphorical level. In political discourse, such linguistic items often turn into stereotypical linguistic tools of particular politicians that leave their mark on the electorate’s ideas of their values and beliefs. The article emphasizes the importance of the use of “strong” linguistic items that help create, in the best case, an image of the politician that includes humoristic associations with his or her individual professional language.