Lexical Opposition Research Articles

Cross-National Rivalry: National Identity in Sports (A Case Study of English and Russian)

Nationalism and sport are often interwoven and, subsequently, the competitive nature of sport competition can also mirror the contentious nature between international athletes. Evidence of such inter-group conflict may manifest itself through ethnolinguistics and is reinforced through social identity theory. Data analysis for the English and Russian languages was evaluated in four categories. Data includes Word Association Network entries for the four opposites of the sport event schema in Russian and English: 1) strong – weak; 2) success – failure; 3) ahead – behind; 4) winner – loser. Semantic analysis established asymmetries of the lexical oppositions relative to sport competition, which reinforce the manifestation of social identity in ways that elevate the status of one group while degrading the perception of the other. The authors believe that this study exposes that the congruence between semantics and ethno-linguistics which is rooted in social identity. The four authors have equally contributed to this study. The contribution included a literature review on the subject of the study and showing how rivalry in sport is influenced by social identity and ethno-linguistics, which helped to identify the dearth of research into cultural implications underlying sports. The authors also collected dictionary definitions of the items of the sports event schema and performed analysis of the data in the English and Russian languages.

ЛІНГВОПРАГМАТИЧНІ ЗАСОБИ САМОІДЕНТИФІКАЦІЇ СУЧАСНОЇ ЖІНКИ У ФЕМІНОЦЕНТРИЧНОМУ АНГЛОМОВНОМУ КІНОДИСКУРСІ: ПЕРЕКЛАДОЗНАВЧИЙ АСПЕКТ

The article is devoted to the study of the linguopragmatic means of self-identification of a modern woman in the feministic English-language film discourse (translational aspect). Gender relations are present in language in the form of culturally conditioned stereotypes that leave an imprint on the process of verbalization depending on the gender of the individual and on the process of his linguistic socialization. In the process of verbalization, the character’s image becomes a category of linguistic consciousness, from which it enters into new associative connections. In the theory of gender, each of the sexes is assigned a set of certain roles in society, as well as personal qualities that play an important role in creating a prototype of male and female in public and individual consciousness. In the analyzed film texts, a number of lexical oppositions were found, which are a kind of projection of gender oppositions – that is, oppositions of stereotypical ideas about what masculinity (man) is and what femininity (woman) is. It is interesting that stereotypical ideas about gender, which exist in the language in the form of oppositions, are practically not explicitly presented in the analyzed film texts. Basically, they are implemented in an implicit, associative (that is, more or less hidden) form. The material of analysis in the work was a feature film that tells about the life and career path of Coco Chanel. The film “Coco Chanel” and the film “Sex and the City”, which depicts female friendship between four female friends. The presence of a gender component in the film text depends on the use of certain linguistic means that can strengthen or weaken the “male/female” dichotomy. The application of the general criteria for the analysis of English language means in the research allows to reveal the peculiarities of the linguistic implementation of modern gender models of behavior. That is why, the study of femininity includes a description of the stereotypes associated with them and the means of formal expression of these stereotypes in the language in the translation aspect.

Лексичні опозиції в поетичному ідіолекті В. Базилевського

The article analyzes the lexical oppositions in V. Bazilevsky’s poetic dictionary. The productivity of antonymic pairs, the components of which represent the religious ideas of a person: soul – body, spirit – body, and heaven – hell, is traced. Individual authorial genitive metaphors typical for the artist’s idiostyle, based on semantically opposed lexemes, which testify to the originality of the poetic perception of the world, have been identified. The poetic contexts, in which the direct and figurative meanings of antonymic polysemes are realized, are described. With the help of the parallel use of direct and figurative meanings of contrasting lexemes, the author achieves a specific sensory image. Individually authored antonymic phrases for common sayings (black world – white world, angel of existence – angel of death, room of laughter – room of tears) that enrich the poetic language have been identified. Syntactic and stylistic constructions that enhance the expressiveness of linguistic contrast are characterized: 1) parcellation; 2) identification of depicted contrasting phenomena; 3) denial of depicted contrasting phenomena; 4) chiasm; 5) refrain; 6) anepiphora; 7) constructions based on double opposition. The analysis of the actual material proved that antitheses in the studied texts are a productive means of creating contrasting characteristics of characters, conveying polar emotions, emphasizing the contrast of depicted objects and phenomena of objective reality, etc. Productivity in the poetic idiolect of V. Bazilevsky of oppositions, which ensure the creation of polar images and pictures of the surrounding world, testifies to antithetical thinking, a multifaceted idea of the complexity and contradictions of human life, a sharpened author’s perception of reality, and a tendency to reflection.

ОСНОВНЫЕ СЕМАСИОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ АРАБСКИХ И ПЕРСИДСКИХ ЗАИМСТВОВАНИЙ В КАРАЧАЕВО-БАЛКАРСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ

Purpose: lexical and semantic interpretation of Arabic and Persian loanwords in the Karachay-Balkar language. Methods: a descriptive method that allows us to present the basic semasiological characteristics of borrowed arabisms and persiisms in a synchronic aspect. An oppositional analysis that makes it possible to distinguish lexical oppositions of identity, equipolent, privative type, and others focused on the functional features of various words. Contextual analysis that involves clarifying the semantics of certain classes of tokens. Results: based on the analysis of the factual material of the Karachay-Balkar language, arabisms and persiisms were identified, which in the recipient language expand their meanings and become polysemantic. Lexical and lexical-grammatical homonyms that form two -, three -, and four-term models of homonymic series of various partial-part belonging are presented. Absolute and partial, multi-root and single-root synonyms are defined, including the dominant synonymous series. The taxonomy of antonyms with foreign language origin is carried out. Scientific novelty: the article is the first to systematically study the basic semasiological characteristics of Arabic and Persian loanwords in the Karachay-Balkar language using the methods of structural linguistics. Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific and pedagogical activities when considering problems related to the identification and linguistic description of arabisms and persiisms that function in the lexical system of the Karachay-Balkar language.

About Lexical Differences between Old Shtokavian Croatian and New Shtokavian Serbian Dialects

The article deals with lexical differences between two Shtokavian Serbo-Croatian dialects: the dialect of the village Siche (Slavonia, Croatia) which belongs to archaic Slavonian dialect, and the dialect of the village of Gospodjinci (Voyvodina, Serbia) belonging to the innovative Shumadia-Voyvodina dialect. The study is actual because there are no dialect atlases of Serbo-Croatian territory and detailed descriptions of lexical features of different Shtokavian dialects. The study uses the lexical material collected specially on the base of the questionnaire of the Serbian-Croatian dialect Atlas. The article compares the differential vocabulary of questionnaires from two named villages. The analysis shows that the main part of differential lexems in two dialects are loan words, mainly of Turkish origin, which replaced in the Voyvodina dialect the Slavic words preserved in Slavonia. Among the lexical differences there are a number of proto-Slavic synonyms, which presumably contrasted various proto-Serbo-Croatian dialects at the beginning of the second Millennium. The words of later origin based on Slavic roots are not very important in the lexical opposition of the two dialects. From geolingustic point of vew Slavonian and Voyvodina dialects present an opposition of Western and Eastern Shtokavian.

O valor contrajuntivo de "acontece que"

O artigo analisa os micropassos de mudança linguística da construção contrajuntiva “acontece que”, utilizando pressupostos teóricos do Funcionalismo norte-americano e da LCU. Ao investigarmos textos dos séculos XV ao XXI, computamos 93 ocorrências em três padrões de uso. O primeiro padrão, contexto-fonte, apresenta o verbo acontecer que predica um sujeito oracional, num cotexto contrastivo, marcado por oposição lexical; um segundo padrão, [X acontece que], contexto crítico, instancia “acontece que” com função de focalizador da informação, sempre antecedido por conectores contrajuntivos, “mas”, e, “agora”; um terceiro padrão, [Aconteceque], contexto isolado, apresenta a gramaticalização de “acontece que” como focalizador e como operador argumentativo de contraste. Observa-se que, dentre os valores semânticos da conjunção prototípica “mas”, propostos por Neves (2011), a construção “acontece que” apresenta: contraposição de informação (parcialmente) nova, restringindo negativamente A; contraposição independente, sendo B um elemento não esperado; ou ainda o elemento B nega tudo o que foi considerado em A.

Глаголы падения в языках мира: фреймы, параметры и типы систем

The article presents the results of a typological analysis of FALLING verbs performed on a sample of 42 languages. Under falling we understand uncontrolled gravity-forced downward motion in the air without contact with a surface. Within this semantic domain, we identify 4 main situations (frames) that consistently underlie lexical oppositions: moving from a higher surface to a lower one (‘the vase fell from the table’), loss of vertical orientation (‘the vase fell and the water spilled on the tablecloth’), falling-destruction (‘the house collapsed’) and detaching (‘the dress fell off the hanger’). Depending on the encoding strategy of these frames, we distinguish between several types of FALLING systems. Two extremes in this typology are represented, on the one hand, by a dominant strategy (i.e., all frames may be covered by the same verb) and, on the other, by a distributive system (a special verb is used for each of the frames). Within our sample, the dominant system is encountered, e.g., in Hindi, Greek, Basque, and Tigrinya, and the distributive one is characteristic of Hungarian, Chukchi, Adyghe, and Khmer. These and other lexicalization patterns are visualized using both a traditional semantic map model and formal concept analysis. The paper also discusses additional parameters that may affect the choice of lexical means — in particular, the type of falling subject, the number of falling items, the peculiarity of the subject’s initial and final positions, the cause of the fall, etc. For example, languages tend to use special verbs to encode falling of precipitation. Multiple subjects (e.g., granular solids or apples) may be lexically opposed to separate elements. In case of humans, verbs of falling may imply a certain orientation of the subject after the falling event (e.g., on one’s back or face down), or a specific reason (falling caused by an internal malfunction — faint, loss of balance, etc., or by an external impact — hitting, shooting, etc.)

Калмыцкая терминология родства как отражение исторических связей и этнокультурных контактов Ойратского мира и тувинцев

Статья представляет собой обобщающую работу, посвященную выявлению специфики системы терминов родства калмыков как лексической микросистемы в отношении распределения составляющих ее отдельных номинационных единиц, а также тех семантических признаков, которые формируют лексические оппозиции внутри этой системы и определяют ее историко-типологическую динамику, в сравнении с системой терминов родства тувинцев. Объясняются причины сходств и различий между терминологиями родства монголоязычных (в частности, ойратских) и тюркоязычных народов на примере номенклатур родства калмыков и тувинцев, а также рассматривается взаимодействие терминов родства и свойства тюркского и монгольского происхождения у тувинцев.Отмечается, что объяснение наблюдаемых лексических сходств тюркских и монгольских языков исключительно как контактных явлений в свете фактов истории самих тюркских языков имеет на несколько порядков меньшую вероятность, чем объяснение тех же сходств как следствие генетического родства алтайских языков при наличии в них некоторого количества перекрестных заимствований. Терминология родства тувинцев-эрзинцев носит отчетливые следы языковых контактов с монголами-ойратами. Для системы терминов родства калмыков характерны строгая соотнесенность терминов родства по признаку пола как по восходящей, так и по нисходящей линиям, наличие особой лексической единицы для номинации родственников по материнской стороне, счет родства до 9-го поколения как по восходящей, так и по нисходящей линиям, тогда как у других монголоязычных народов учитывается счет родства только до 5-го поколения по восходящей и 4-го поколения по нисходящей линиям.

THE NOTION “LEXICAL BRAZILIANISM” AND ITS INTERPRETATION

European and Brazilian variants of Portuguese differ from one another on different levels, including lexis. Lexical divergences can be either of systemic or of variational nature. One can speak of systemic oppositions when the lexemes in question are not regularly used outside the national variant they belong to. Variational opposition presupposes that the lexemes opposed are used in both variants but their frequency differs considerably. Traditionally, the words that make up the Brazilian pole of systemic oppositions are called “brasileirismos” (“brazilianisms”), which is reflected in lexicographic sources by means of special sigla. However, a considerable number of lexemes that are obviously preferred by Brazilian Portuguese speakers (in contrast to the European Portuguese language community) are not accompanied by the corresponding sigla. This fact makes us believe, firstly, that the notion “brazilianism” in modern Brazilian lexicography is still vague, and, secondly, that lexical oppositions between European and Brazilian Portuguese are of continuous nature, that is, their preferential use in Brazil is rather a tendency than a necessity.

Лексичні опозиції в назвах постів С. Жадана як засіб вираження авторської інтенції

The article deals with semantically opposed lexemes in the headings of S. Zhadan’s posts on the platform „TSN.ua”. Among the various means of enhancing the expressiveness of the headlines of journalistic works, the pragmatization of informative, evaluative and intriguing functions of names, the writer prefers lexical opposition. The grammatical level of the antonymy expression in the blogger's messages is represented predominantly by symmetric antonymic pairs of nouns, rarely adjectives, substantiated adjectives. S. Zhadan uses asymmetric antonyms. To enhance the emotional perception of headlines, the publicist uses an antonymy to create oxymorons. The most productive in the names of blog messages is the opposition life – death. Lexical opposition is used by S. Zhadan for locative characteristics. The author often uses the binary contrast between the East and the West. It defines the geographical parts of Ukraine and the outlook of people living in these territories. Lexical opposition performs stylistic functions of creating contrasting characteristics of Ukrainians according to ideological beliefs. The lexical opposition in the names of posts is verbalized in temporality. It is presented by the opposition to the past – the present. Despite the representation in the names of messages of locality and temporality through opposing relations directly in the text, the writer often eliminates the opposition of the concepts.

"Мій дім – в долонях світлої журби…" (описово-оцінна функція оксиморонних синтагм у поетичному словнику)

The phenomenon of evaluation for the development of the functional direction, the pragmatic aspect of the study of the language system is an important category in domestic and foreign linguistics. The purpose of the article is to analyze oxymoron syntagms with descriptive-evaluative function in poetic texts, to investigate the unexpected associative connections of lexical opposition as a manifestation of linguistic contrasts. The research material is the oxymorons, recorded in the poetic texts of the second half of the twentieth – the first half of the XI century. The poetic language as a system in terms of „aesthetic charge” maximizes its potential – nominative, expressive, accumulative, demonstrating dynamics and versatility. In the investigated poetic texts, these oxymoron syntagms with the estimated component were recorded: oxymoron, which is a means of human characteristics; oxymoron, which is a means of evaluating objects, properties and processes of objective reality. The most productive are oxymoron syntagms with anthropocentric component.

Семантико-стилістичні функції контрастивів у художніх текстах Івана Нечуя-Левицького

The article researches semantic and stylistic functions of antonymous lexemes in I. Nechui-Levytskyi’s artistic works, one of the greatest masters of artistic stories (on material of the story „Above the Black sea”). As a result of the research carried out it is established that by means of oppositions I. Nechui-Levytskyi expresses love of positive characters (Victor Komashko, Nadiia Murashkova) to their land, native people, faith in the best future and shows hypocrisy, cruelty and despotism of negative heroes (Selabros, Fesenko). An author also uses lexical oppositions for creation of contrasting descriptions of characters, in particular Sani and Nadi. Their contrasting goes through the whole work. The productivity of antonymic lexemes which characterize appearance of characters, their mental conditions, emotions, feelings is identified. The contrasting mental condition of characters is underlined by oxymoron syntagms, grounded on the use emotional and evaluative lexemes. Constructions with a negative particle not are selected. These constructions characterize I. Nechui-Levytskyi’s artistic works and have semantic and stylistic functions in the story, underline contrasting actions and states of characters, bring emotional expressiveness to the text. The analysis of the actual material discovered that lexical antonyms in I. Nechui-Levytskyi’s story “Above the Black sea” were the productive means of describing polar characters, underlining their contrasting actions and states, as well as they were the elements of describing landscape.

Lexically dependent estimation of acoustic information in speech

Current estimates of the relevant acoustic information in speech are typically inventory-based. They assume a set of phonemes or featural/gestural decompositions of phonemes exists in a language, and proceed to identify and rank/weight the set of acoustic parameters sufficient to distinguish a phonemic contrast based on data from instantiations of the sounds/categories comprising those contrasts in either a controlled set of real words in the language or in nonword syllables. Acknowledging that such contrasts ultimately derive from lexical oppositions, we present an alternative, complementary approach to the quantification of acoustic information in speech: one that is lexically based. Using acoustic data from the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision project (Tucker et al., 2018)—over 26,000 unique words produced by a single speaker of Western Canadian English—and listener identification data on a representative 240-word sample of that lexicon, we define a weighted network of the phonological lexicon (cf. Vitevitch, 2008), where the weights on links between minimal pairs correspond to the predicted acoustic similarity from a model fit to the listener error distributions. From this network the distributed, “global” information contributed by individual parameters operating in an ensemble of lexical oppositions can be estimated from changes in network entropy under perturbations of those parameters.

The peculiarities of medical scientific neologisms translation from english to ukrainian

In the pursuit of fidelity and equivalence at the word level a translator must face numerous problems. This article provides a contribution to the issue of handling abbreviations and acronyms in medical translation, which are one of the most problematic lexical groups. The article deals with the translation of medical terminology, especially neologisms, abbreviations and acronyms that are an objective translational problem that can cause serious difficulties despite the professional interpreter’s skills. The most effective solution of this problem is to perceive not only the structural peculiarities of medical terms as well as abbreviations and acronyms, but also to realize a segment of reality that is in the process of perception and processing by an interpreter when appropriate interpretation of a neologism or abbreviation is carried out. The procedures for handling shortened forms provided here are universal and can be applied to all languages.It needs to be pointed out at the beginning that the English words abbreviation and acronym are differently defined in various dictionaries and scholarly papers, leading to misunderstanding and chaos in nomenclature. As a matter of fact, not all of them recognize the lexical opposition of those two notions at all. Because of such a divergence, it is necessary to state which definition is adopted here.

Znaczenie słowa i zasada wewnętrznej motywacji cech semantycznych

The meaning of a word has a layered structure with the clearly distinguished center (prototype, lexical meaning) and – the further towards the peripheries – with semantic connotations more and more weak-established in the system. Giving-up ofthe purely structuralist understanding of connotations (verified by semantic and morphological derivatives, collocations, repeatable lexical oppositions, or various tests) has created a danger that semantically irrelevant components may be recognized as relevant qualities. The article proposes a rule for verification of weak connotations. Underlying the principle of internal motivation of qualities is the conviction that the meaning of a word is internally structured, while each quality, especially weak connotations, are motivated by the overall structure of meaning and are explained in the context of this structure.

How to construct a case of Alzheimer's disease in three languages: case-based reasoning in narrative gerontology

ABSTRACTThis paper explores how people reason about Alzheimer's disease by telling stories about others who have the disease. More specifically, the paper is a cross-linguistic investigation of the narrative and linguistic devices used by African Americans in English, Mexican Americans in Spanish, and refugees/immigrants from the former Soviet Union (to the United States of America) in Russian in their oral productions of such stories. We examine the narratives as instances of case-based reasoning in which lay people (non-medical professionals) distinguish, represent and ‘perform’ symptomatic behaviours and construct a ‘case’ of the disease as a way of probing the difference between the normal and the pathological in conversational contexts. In particular, we examine situations in which stories are accepted and confirmed and situations in which stories are contested and negotiated. Common narrative and discursive devices across the three languages include concatenation, intertextuality, conjunction and conjunctive adverbs, lexical opposition, past progressive tenses, temporal adverbials, reported speech and prosodic cues. The fine-grained analysis of these narrative and discursive devices lays bare the inner-workings of case-based reasoning as a conversational task and suggests specific linguistic tools for intervening in lay narrative reasoning in clinical settings and in public health messaging about Alzheimer's disease.

Enkele beschouwingen over processen van dialectverandering en regiolectvorming in Belgisch- en Nederlands-Limburg

Although the border between Dutch and Belgian Limburg is younger than the remainder of the border between both countries, its influence has been illustrated repeatedly for e.g. lexical oppositions. This article deals with the question whether the border between the Netherlands and the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium might play a diverging role in the formation of regiolects in the Dutch and Belgian province of Limburg. Hinskens (1992) has been able to describe several instances of dialect levelling and regiolectization in the southeast Dutch Limburg dialect of Rimburg that take place in the direction of either Standard Dutch or the more western Limburg dialects. The same goes for e.g. the decline of the Sittard diphtongization. In Belgian Limburg, however, there as to be no sign yet of the formation of regiolects, at least as fas as concerns some phonological developments. This can be partly due to the less strong influence of the standard language and the orientation towards an own Belgian substandard, but might probably also be related to the fact that the dialect landscape in Belgian Limburg consists of many more smaller scaled areas than in Dutch Limburg and lacks a widely spread or prestigious variant. Furthermore, it seems that there is no significant difference with regard to the pace at which changes take place in dialects or regiolects. In contrast to what e.g. Hoppenbrouwers (1983) previously assumed, language change in dialects does not develop relatively slow, as can be shown by means of some internally conditioned dialect changes in Zutendaal in the second half of the twentieth century.

Lexical neutralisation: a case study of the lexical opposition ‘day’/‘night’

This article is concerned with the adoption the principle of neutralisation into the field of the lexicon. Its starting point is the way the concept of lexical neutralisation is defined in the writings of E. Coseriu. In the central focus are questions on the semantic status of the unmarked term of neutralisable lexical oppositions. It is argued that Coseriu’s claim that the unmarked term has two linguistic valeurs at the same time (specific/oppositive and neutral/generic) is problematic from a strictly structural–functional point of view because it contradicts with the postulate that language-specific meanings are homogeneous and unitary. The article explores the possibility of an alternative structural–functional approach to the semantic variation of the unmarked term that may be more consistent with this postulate. In addition, the general claim that neutralisations are always unidirectional (one of the terms of an opposition can semantically encompass another, but not vice versa) is also explored with regard to the lexicon domain. As a case study, Coseriu’s often-mentioned lexical example Tag/ Nacht in German is analysed using historical and current corpus data. The principle of neutralisation predicts that only Tag can have the neutral meaning ‘24-h period’, whereas the term Nacht is excluded from being used in a neutral way. First, our analysis shows that this principle might be true for present-day German but does not account for earlier stages of German and other Germanic languages (diachronic argument). Second, examples derived from a non-European language (Basketo) show that the unidirectional neutralisation relation between the lexical units for ‘day’ and ‘night’ does not hold universally (typological argument). From these empirical findings, conclusions are drawn regarding a general semantic theory of neutralisation.

Tachoni verbal tonology

This paper sketches tone in the Luhya (Bantu) language Tachoni, spoken in Western Kenya, with the goal of filling a lacuna in our understanding of tonal grammars both in Bantu and human language. Most aspects of Tachoni tone are encountered in other Bantu languages, such as the two-way lexical opposition in root tone as well as rules eliminating contour tones on long vowels. Tachoni also eliminates word-final H tones, via tone retraction, and there is the well-known deletion of H tone after H known as Meeussen’s Rule. Also typical of Bantu, certain tense-aspects are marked with a melodic tone pattern. The major melodic pattern involves a final H plus leftward spreading, following simple rules that yield a complex surface pattern.

A articulação "Themata-Fundos Tópicos": por uma análise pragmática da linguagem

Este trabalho defende a articulação themata-fundos tópicos, visando uma abordagem pragmática da linguagem. O método Alceste permite operar essa articulação. As classes que ele detecta correspondem às tomadas de posição dos enunciadores. Os fundos tópicos contém themata. As extremidades dos eixos fatoriais correspondem às taxinomias, às polaridades opostas que dinamizam as relações intergrupos. Esta abordagem pragmática da linguagem, por intermédio do programa Alceste, fornece ao psicólogo social os elementos necessários para a construção de um sistema explicativo, capaz de restituir o elo perdido entre as distribuições dos mundos lexicais e as relações intergrupos.