Lexical Expressions Research Articles

Lexical Choice and Rhetorical Expression

Many religions understand themselves as fundamentally aligned to a givenculture or people. Hinduism is intrinsically connected to the Indian cultureand caste system. Daoism and Confucianism are highly integrated into theChinese spirit and the cultural mentality of the Orient. Shinto’s cosmology,myths, and rites concern themselves solely with the Japanese. Even in theWest, Judaism locates itself with the people of Israel. Jews welcome converts,but Judaism has never seen itself as a proselytizing religion. Islamis convinced that Muhammad’s message is both universal and constitutesthe highest revelation. Thus, it is a proselytizing religion. But Muslims historicallyand today believe that non-Muslims can be saved in the contextof their own religious traditions, particularly if these are monotheistic.Christianity perhaps stands alone as a religion that has historically believedthat membership in the church is necessary for salvation. Add to this thatRoman Catholicism had believed that Catholic membership was necessary.As the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) declared, “There is only one universalchurch of the faithful, outside which none can be saved.” More recently,most Christians, including Catholics, think that God’s saving grace is availableoutside its ecclesial boarders, but this is a modern idea.What then to think of the religious other? In the seventeenth century,a Catholic had few conceptual choices. One was to consider religious othersand their sacred texts as valuable preparation for the gospel, and thusadmire what could be admired in them. They had something of what St.Justin Martyr called the Logos spermatikos, seeds of the Word. This includedthe principle of inculturation whereby European culture was not to beconflated with Christianity. This principle became policy, at least in theory, ...

Lexical Choice and Rhetorical Expression in Ignazio Lomellini’s 1622 Translation of and Commentary on the Qur’an

Animadversiones, Notae ac Disputationes in Pestilentem Alcoranum is a unique document housed in the University of Genoa library and consisting of the entire text of the Qur’ān in Arabic, a Latin translation of same, and extensive commentaries and marginalia in Latin, with a few short passages in Arabic and Hebrew. The document is dated 1622 and has heretofore received little attention from scholars. Although Animadversiones had none of the impact of other early Latin translations of the Qur’ān, this text is of considerable value as an example of how early Western Christian scholars of the Qur’ān grappled with lexical, syntactical and exegetical problems. This article examines a series of lexical choices made by Lomellini and touches on some of his exegetical discourses, his intended audiences, and possible sources and informants. Special attention is given to the tension between Lomellini’s mission to propagate the Catholic faith and his desire to produce a translation faithful to the meaning of the original.

Metaphor and ideology: Conceptual structure and conceptual content in Spanish political discourse

This article presents the results of the analysis of a number of linguistic metaphors found in a corpus of opinion articles published in the Spanish newspaper El País. The authors included in the corpus, who tend towards the left of the political spectrum, use metaphor to express moral judgements on the actions and decisions of the conservative, centre-right People’s party ( Partido Popular or PP), which governs Spain with an overall majority. With the aim of describing this discourse, we have undertaken a qualitative analysis with a conceptual framework deriving from CDA and cognitive linguistics. First, therefore, we have made use of the methodology developed by Steen and the Pragglejaz group to extract the discourse units that could be considered as the lexical expression of an underlying mapping between domains, that is, the metaphors; second, according to the descriptions of Talmy, Croft, Sweetser, Sullivan, and Dancygier and Sweetser, we have verified that the different types of grammatical structure in which the lexical items appeared also indicated the existence of a metaphorical thought process; and third, in the words of van Dijk, we have studied the ideological semantics underlying conceptual structures and conceptual content. As we have demonstrated, all the samples of linguistic metaphors found led readers to construct the same interpretation of the meaning: The Spanish People’s party government is the past, a past that provokes rejection and which was thought to be definitively ended.

Lexical Expressions of Time in Russian Sign Language

Lexical Expressions of Time in Russian Sign Language

The Gerascophobic Treatment of Clarissa Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: A Semantic Analysis

The paper investigates the gerascophobic temperament of the protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway following the theory of semantic analysis. Although the plot orbits mundane events yet beneath the surface of everyday life, thoughts of progression towards death lurk persistently. With the help of the terms and expressions made by different characters in the novel, the paper finds how Virginia Woolf sets up the gerascophobic temperament of the characters by placing several personal, temporal, spatial and social lexical expressions in the novel at various intervals subconsciously.

Functional Possibilities of Expressive Lexical Facilities in Professional Tourist Communication

The change in emphasis of linguistic investigations towards anthropocentrism directs researchers to reveal creative mechanisms of verbalization expertise in modern scientific paradigm. Lexical means of expression take a special place in professional communication and have the ability to represent elements of professional knowledge peculiarly. Appeals to the functionalities of the stylistic tropes and figures are motivated in our article primarily by their wide use for pragmatic purpose specialist’ implementation. The purpose and objectives. The functionalities of lexical means of expression are considered; the role and place in professional tourism communication are defined; how employees of tourism industry form the tourists’ attitude to certain phenomena of reality are found out in the article. Experts of tourism enterprises should affect not only the sense of potential tourists, but also their imagination providing communicative comfort. For this purpose managers operate on a whole case of lexical expression means – stylistic tropes and figures that are part of elements in the contact creation. It is well known fact that their application is always promoted to colorful creation of different aspects phenomena in the language. In professional speech tourism communication we observe tropes’ usage as a leverage the recipient to create vivid images with a high degree of suggestibility in his mind. Experts in tourism industry use quite colorful composition vocabulary which “under power of romantic profession” is supersaturated with multiple comparisons: everything is as a legend, as a work of art in Vienna; Bulgaria, like endless field dotted with colorful flower and green parks. Metaphor in professional tourism lexicon often becomes a means of emotional impact on the recipient and involves a surreal space where you can see the necklace of islands of the Indian Ocean, dip in the whirlpool of sea impressions, sunbathe in the sun bathed beach. If the metaphor is understood as the transfer by the name similarity, metonymy is regarded as transfer based on adjacency of objects and phenomena. In the tourism sector metonymy promotes accumulation оf linguistic means for clearer and concise structure in providing information such as: Cherkasy region offers opportunities for unique, interesting and cognitive rest; Ukraine entered the top 10 countries by number of tourists in Turkey. Epithet function is to provide a positive asessment of tourist facilities, emphasizing its importance: a fantastic atmosphere, a picturesque peninsula, a luxurious excursion program, a perfect hotel infrastructure. A tourism manager using hyperbole convince potential tourist that he buys all the best. The usage of hyperbole animates the description of tourist sites and at the same time promotes the attitude creation to delivered information. For example, the rating of the most popular countries among tourists Spain ranked the first; for a beach holiday one should go to beautiful Zanzibar. One of the most prominent means of creating an attractive image of tourism services are stable expressions. Such words and phrases are perceived as something unexpected that contrasting with the rest of the text. They promote to strengthening linguistic influence: relax with a royal scale, it is time to see the world, you will have a great opportunity to visit a unique museum of port wine, with this tour operator everything will be in chocolate and others. So lexical means of expressions in professional tourism communication have a significant impact on the recipient’s speech because of his originality and expressiveness. Namely such verbal tools give impetus to the author’ display of his artistic identity, promote the impact on consumers’ high intensity of tourism product by creating certain emotional effect and provide opportunities for manipulation of the audience. All these factors taken together affect the consumer choice of potential tourist ultimately.

ЛЕКСИЧЕСКИЕ СРЕДСТВА ВЫРАЖЕНИЯ ОППОЗИЦИИ «СВОЙ – ЧУЖОЙ» В РУССКОЯЗЫЧНОЙ ЗАРУБЕЖНОЙ ПРЕССЕ СЛАВЯНСКИХ ГОСУДАРСТВ

In this article, the opposition of the “own – alien” in the Russian-language pressof the Slavic states is considered. The research is based on the hypothesis assumingthe presence of the opposition “own-alien” in media texts, which may be due to massmigrations, frequent acts of terrorism, and complicated political relations between statesin the modern world. The article presents ways of manifesting the opposition “own – alien”in media texts and discusses the features of the lexical expression of this opposition.

An Empirical Study on the Authenticity of Item for Testing Advanced Korean Language Learner’s Comprehension of News Headline in Reading Section of TOPIK

The purpose of this study is to verify the authenticity of items for testing Korean language learners’ comprehension of news headlines in reading section of TOPIK, and to present some proposals for improving the authenticity of items. The 84 items for testing advanced Korean language learners’ comprehension of news headlines are extracted from the reading section of 39 kinds of TOPIK. And then, the authenticity of 84 news headlines is investigated on the semantic structure, theme, lexical expression, ending form, and punctuation mark or symbol based on the 683 Internet news headlines extracted from the Internet portal site, NAVER. Through an analysis on the authenticity of news headlines in TOPIK, a couple of differences between the news headlines in TOPIK and the Internet news headlines are found as follows: (1) The cause-effect structures as semantic structure of news headlines are used the most in TOPIK, but the composite structures are used the most in Internet. (2) The themes of news headlines in TOPIK are not as various as them in Internet. (3) Numbers, direct quotations, and proper nouns are used a lot in Internet, while idiomatic expressions are used a lot in TOPIK. (4) The roots of words are used the most as an ending form of news headlines in TOPIK as well as Internet. Meanwhile, connective endings are used the most in TOPIK. On the other hand, final endings are used the most in Internet. (5) Commas are used the most in TOPIK, while ellipses are used the most in Internet.

Andalucismos léxicos en muestras de literatura oral de la Comarca de la Sierra de Segura (Jaén) / Andalusian Lexical Expressions in Samples of Oral Literature of the Region of Sierra de Segura (Jaén)

La literatura de transmisión oral es una rica e inagotable fuente de léxico que va transmitiéndose de generación en generación y que, además, en muchas ocasiones, se circunscribe a áreas dialectales bastante acotadas y que, por tanto, ya no recogen los diccionarios generales al uso.En el presente trabajo pretendemos extraer y recopilar los andalucismos léxicos hallados en las muestras recopiladas en las localidades de la Sierra de Segura e incorporadas al Corpus de Literatura Oral, a fin de atestiguar la historia de las voces dialectales documentadas y su huella, si la hay, en los repertorios lexicográficos del español.

Between the Conceptual and the Signified: How Language Changes when Using Dynamic Geometry Software for Construction Tasks

Spoken and written language change when students (age 14–15) work with digital tools in the mathematics classroom. The digital tool not only offers new experiences and actions that directly influence language, but also provides lexical expressions such as buttons or technical expressions that students use. This article studies language used in the mathematics classroom empirically when working with dynamic geometry software (DGS), especially in the context of geometrical constructions. The results show the variety of different lexical phenomena in the students’ use of language. The use of such lexical expressions also mirrors the use of the digital tool itself. Qualitative analysis of the videotaped paired task-based clinical interviews shows both obstacles and potentials of the lexical expressions that students use when working with dynamic geometry software.

The Notion of Approximation in Language

This paper seeks to explicate the notion of approximation in language: the state of being close or near to a desired number or amount. Approximation is used to reflect a lack of exact knowledge. This paper adopts Cognitive Semantics and attempts to apply two of its fundamental claims to the description of markers denoting approximation. One claim is that all linguistic elements posited in language have semantic content. On the basis of this claim, the paper argues that a marker of approximation has conceptual content of its own which conditions its presence in a construction. Each marker adds semantic import to the construction in which it occurs. The other claim is that the use of a lexical expression is the outcome of the specific construal imposed on a situation. On the basis of this claim, the paper argues that the uses of approximating markers represent different dimensions of construal. Each marker signals a different perspective of the speaker in describing the world. The aim is to show, based on examples, that approximating markers are not random choices. Each marker has a distinct message in the language.

“Odiar” en el Nuevo Testamento (odi, odio sum, odio habeo): traducción y construcciones con verbo soporte en la Vulgata

In the New Testament Vulgate, the Greek verb μισέω (“to hate”) is translated either as the Latin verb odi, or as the constructions with support verb odio habeo and odio sum. In order to understand the criteria that explain these three translations, we will analyze, from a diachronic perspective, the use of odio habeo and odio sum in the Latin literature from Plautus to Gellius. We will also discuss, in a synchronic view, their survival in late Latin, with special attention to the different translations of μισέω in the Vulgate and in the previous versions of the Vetus Latina. The semantic and syntactic differences between odio habeo and odio sum, on the one hand, and between these two collocations and the verb odi, on the other, constitute other purpose of this paper: whereas odio sum is the lexical expression of the passive of odi, odio habeo shares contexts with odi, but in complementary distribution.

‘School? You go because you have to’. The linguistic worldview of ‘school’ in Polish and American teen Internet discourse

This cross-cultural project applies current theories in Cognitive Linguistics to the issue of youth (dis)engagement in the high school setting. Specifically, it analyses American and Polish youth speech from online forums and dictionaries according to five main categories: the institution of school, the place of school, the people of school, the activities of school and the emotions of school. The analysis presents these lexical expressions grouped according to metaphorical source domain in order to better understand how teenagers in each culture conceptualize SCHOOL. The discussion summarises the analysis for each country, whereas the conclusion compares the two and makes comments on the implication for theories of language and education. The aims of this paper are three-fold: to increase understanding of the ways in which youth view their time in the classroom, to provide a comparative analysis that will shed light on cultural differences in the conceptualization of SCHOOL and its linguistic expression, and to highlight examples of metaphors that value school and the educational process so that these conceptual mappings can receive more emphasis in both countries.

Denominações sobre o campo semântico do convívio e comportamento social utilizadas por falantes de Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa

This paper deals with the lexical variation on the denominations used by speakers of African countries where Portuguese is the official language (PALOPs), as answers from the semantic-lexical questionnaire of Brazil Linguistic Atlas, analyzing lexical varieties used by those Portuguese speakers to characterize concepts, since, by using a lexical expression to name something, are styling concepts according to their worldviews. This enquiry is part of a larger Project - of the Linguistic Variation, and Speech Discourse Processing: analysis and applications group (PROFALA1).

Production of mental state terms in narratives of Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the ability of Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to use mental state terms in narratives. The narrative data are from 16 children with ASD and 16 typically developing children, matched on language and cognitive abilities. The narratives were elicited using Frog, where are you? Participants’ use of lexical expressions referring to emotion, cognition, desire and perception was examined. The ‘deer episode’ of the story was chosen to analyse children’s ability to talk about misrepresentation. The results reveal that the two groups of children performed comparably in basic narrative measures, overall use of mental state terms and references to the misrepresentation. The outcomes underscore the importance of examining different types of mental state terms separately. These findings are discussed in relation to linguistic and cognitive factors in mental-state attribution.

Early lexical expression in children exposed to mixed input: A case of monolingual or bilingual development?

Aims and objectives:This study documents early lexical expression in children whose language input in the home was predominantly Maltese, accompanied by regular exposure to English lexical mixing. Bilingualism and language contact were also present at the societal level. The study attempts to determine whether the children’s pattern of vocabulary growth corresponded to a monolingual or bilingual mode of development.Methodology:The expressive vocabularies of 60 children aged 1;0 to 2;6 years were measured using caregiver reports and language sampling.Data and analysis:Expressive scores representing total vocabulary, Maltese and English words as well as translation equivalents were derived from the language samples and caregiver-completed vocabulary checklists.Findings and conclusions:Both Maltese and English words were identified in the children’s expressive vocabularies. Higher translation equivalent proportions were reported across daily settings than were sampled. Participants seemed to introduce new equivalents for words previously used in one language according to the needs of the communicative context. These findings demonstrate a basic level of bilingualism in the participants and suggest selective use of equivalents in response to environmental demands. The latter would imply the presence of a double lexical system, indicating a more refined bilingual status, although insufficient contextual evidence made this a tentative proposition. Fragmented exposure to English appeared unable to support the participants’ bilingual development beyond the lexical domain.Originality:While documenting lexical development in children exposed to a distinctive language-learning context that is as yet under-researched, this study adds to the limited evidence on lexical expression in young children exposed to substantial lexical mixing in their input.Significance:These findings highlight the development of bilingual proficiency as a process that spreads across linguistic levels in accordance with input variables. They also suggest that Maltese children’s bilingual lexicons may have the potential to kick-start their sequential bilingual development once systematic exposure to integral English is introduced through schooling.

THE ROLE OF SHOGENTSUKOV A.A. IN EXTENDING THE SEMANTICS OF WORDS IN THE KABARDINO-CIRCASSIAN LANGUAGE

The history of Kabardino-Circassian literary language formation is inseparably linked with the name of the founder and classic of the Kabardinian literature Ali A. Shogentsukov (1900-1941). Therefore it is obvious that it is important to learn the language of his works - it is necessary for linguists, first of all, in order to develop ways of further development of the language. This article discusses the methods and techniques that have been used by Ali A. Shogentsukov to enrich the semantics of words. In his works, the poet used various means of word-figurative art (metaphors, comparisons, paraphrases), through which he extended the meaning of the word, giving to it new shades of meaning. Another way - lexical and morphological expression, that is the expression created by the composition of the word - by inclusion in a word prefixes and suffixes of subjective evaluation, transmitting a variety of shades of feelings. Along with the above context has a vital role: neutral words can be perceived, depending on the environment as high solemn, and the high vocabulary in different conditions becomes mockingly ironic form.

Word Formation in South American Languages ed. by Swintha Danielsen, Katja Hannss, and Fernando Zúñiga

Reviewed by: Word Formation in South American Languages ed. by Swintha Danielsen, Katja Hannss, and Fernando Zúñiga Hein van der Voort Word Formation in South American Languages. Edited by Swintha Danielsen, Katja Hannss, and Fernando Zúñiga. Studies in Language Companion Series 163. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014. Pp. vi + 228. $149.00 (hardcover). This new volume in the companion series to the journal Studies in Language has come out of a workshop on Word Formation in South American Languages organized in June 2011 in Leipzig, Germany, by Femmy Admiraal, Swintha Danielsen and Katja Hannss. The main focus of the call for papers was on compounding, which has not received as much attention in South American language studies as other morphological processes. Only a few of the talks at the workshop made it to the volume in the form of an article. Nevertheless, the majority of the nine articles deal with compounding and related phenomena, two articles deal with reduplication, and the last article focuses on nominalization. As a consequence, the volume is tilted towards compounding and does not cover much of what can be considered canonical derivational morphology. The introduction to the volume is very useful. It presents the topic of the volume and definitions with ample reference to literature, it gives a brief overview of each article in the volume, and it has a useful map locating the languages discussed. The editors define “word formation” in the sense of Bauer (2006), excluding inflection. Strange as it may seem, there are few cross-linguistic studies of word formation as a topic including compounding, reduplication, and derivation. The editors refer to Štekauer and Lieber (2005), noting the sparsity of studies on word formation in “smaller” languages and hoping to contribute to filling this gap for a selection of understudied South American languages. Below, I discuss the chapters one by one. Fernando Zúñiga’s carefully written chapter, “Nominal Compounds in Mapudungun,” is an important contribution to the field of Mapudungun studies. As a polysynthetic agglutinating language, the focus has traditionally been on its rich verb morphology rather than on nominal compounding–what Zúñiga calls “multi-stem nominal expressions.” Zúñiga evaluates and compares the way such nominal expressions have been analyzed in previous studies, showing specific gaps in the analyses. He proposes a more typologically meaningful classification (and subclassification) of nominal compounds that takes into account the systematic correlation between syntactic headedness and the kind of semantic relationship that obtains between head and dependent. For example, when the semantic relationship between head and dependent is intimate, as in the case of a body part, the compound is head-initial. When the relationship is nonintimate, the concomitant parts of the compound have relative phonological independence. When the relationship is unspecified, the compound is head-final. Temis L. Tacconi’s chapter, “Towards a Characterization of Compounding in Maká,” on a Mataco-Mataguayan language of the Paraguayan Chaco region, is the weakest of the volume. The chapter seeks to discuss criteria for regarding lexemes as compounds and whether their behavior is distinctive to the Mataco-Mataguayan family or reflects universal principles. The data on Maká are rich and fascinating, but both the presentation and the analysis are somewhat confusing. The inconsistent use of zero third person morphemes further complicates the analyses. What is said in the text sometimes does not seem to match the examples. Contrasts and criteria are sometimes lacking when the author claims to demonstrate properties or categories. (For instance, how do we see that a certain combination of words is “frozen”? Why is ‘hard’ a noun?) The text contains [End Page 340] unusual terminology such as “derivative morphemes.” This chapter should have been edited more carefully. Paola Cúneo’s chapter “Augmentative Form in Toba (Guaycuruan): Form and Function,” is an interesting contribution to the study of compounds. It discusses derivational and lexical expressions of evaluative notions such as big size, abundance, intensity, excess, and mockery. After a useful discussion of the notion of evaluative morphology in general (see also Cúneo 2015), the author elaborates on the different augmentative expressions in Toba and how these can grammaticalize via compounding. Plant and animal names...

Critical Discourse Analysis of Corruption in Presidential Speeches

Corruption is not only a well-known lexical expression (e.g. Orpin, 2005), it is also a social phenomenon (e.g. Khondker, 2006; Collier, 2002) researched by scholars from different fields and from different standpoints. However, the study of corruption from the perspective of language has not enjoyed adequate research. This is especially true of the speeches of Nigerian presidents that are particularly revealing of how a president/government construes corruption. This research paper explores and analyzes the discursive positioning of corruption by two successive Nigerian presidents - Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan - using their two official speeches as data. Following Halliday’s system of Transitivity (Halliday, 1978, 1985, 1993) and Fairclough’s three-tier analytical framework grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis (1989, 1992, 1995), this paper argues that official speeches of presidents (particularly in Nigeria) can discursively reveal their commitment to fighting corruption. Also, the instruments of language can be used tactically absolve themselves from corruption.

Kıbrıs Ağzında Gereklik Üzerine

This paper focuses on the expression of necessity as a modal notion in Cypriot Turkish. A qualitative analysis of data gathered from various sources reveals that periphrastic or lexical expressions such as mecbur‘obliged,’ lazim ‘necessary,’ illa ‘insistently,’ mutlaka ‘definitely,’ etc. rather than the necessitative mood marker -mAlI serve to express various subcategories of necessity in Cypriot Turkish. These findings suggest that necessity in Cypriot Turkish is less grammaticalized than in Standard Turkish. For an adequate account of the behaviour of the structures analyzed, a number of further semantic and pragmatic notions seem to be required in addition to those offered by the logical approach to modality.