Linguistic Investigation Research Articles

Le rôle du lexique transdisciplinaire dans la constitution des terminologies techniques : le cas de l’industrie de la plasturgie

The Role of Transdisciplinary Vocabulary in Technical Terminology Formation: The case of the plastic industry
 Our article focuses on the technical terminology formation, more exactly on the formation of plastic terminology and on the role given to transdisciplinary lexicon. In order to offer a global perspective on the plastic terminology, firstly, we have relied on a variety of classifications regarding the technical terms and terminological units, and on examples extracted from documents used in professional environments such as factories, associations etc. The technical terms specific for the plastic industry were classified as follows: operations, products, machines, and materials. We can state that, after examining the contexts and the terminological units used in the technical discourse, the plastic terminology represents a complex terminology and that various fields have influenced it, among them we mention: chemistry, physics, mechanics, informatics, electronics, production management, metallurgy etc. All these disciplines have played an essential part in the formation of the plastic lexicon. The linguistic investigations will enable us to obtain various results regarding the distribution of these terms and terminological units per domain. The results obtained through the intermediary of statistical measures realised with the help of Sketch Engine, a software specialised in automatic extraction of terminology, provides us the opportunity to offer a detailed description of the plastic terminology and essential information concerning the transdisciplinary vocabulary. The investigations carried out and the manual selection helped us present a classification for the transdisciplinary vocabulary and a comparison with the disciplinary vocabulary in order to emphasize the role played by this type of lexicon. Consequently, we will be able to establish the connections between transdisciplinary vocabulary and the formation of plastic terminology. Our research encompasses the idea that we cannot identify equality between the disciplinary vocabulary and the transdisciplinary vocabulary, and we go even further, and we state that the last one occupies a predominant position, being also caracterised by diversity.

The Pragmatics of Fiction: Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse

The Pragmatics of Fiction: Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse

Differences in syntactic annotation affect retrieval

AbstractPrepositional phrases (PPs) play an important part in English argument structure constructions, but pose considerable challenges for linguistic investigations of any kind. In addition to the fact that PP-attachment is generally notoriously difficult to model computationally, a particularly striking methodological challenge in investigating verb-dependent PPs across (synchronic and/or diachronic) corpora is that such cross-corpus studies may have to rely on material annotated with different tools. This study evaluates the impact that such differences in corpus annotation may have on retrieval of verb-attached PPs by means of data from Early and Late Modern English corpora. Our intrinsic (recall/precision) and extrinsic parser evaluation shows that annotation does play a role, but that the noise introduced is negligible as far as frequency developments are concerned.

Marriage, Conflict, and Communication: Pragmatic Inquiry into Impoliteness in the Marital Relationship

The issue of impoliteness has long been a matter of interest in linguistic investigations. Considerable research has been conducted to uncover factors and features regarding the realizations of impoliteness in multiple social contexts. This study engages in a pragmatic inquiry into impoliteness in the marital relationship. The data of this study consisted of a TV episode from one famous on-site mediation reality program in China. Primarily drawing on Bousfield’s (2008) model of impoliteness realizations, this study used a qualitative approach to examine the means by which the couple in a marital relationship causes face-attacking effects and ultimately arouses conflicts. The primary findings of this study indicate that couples might struggle with various communicative challenges. A problematic marital relationship tends to be signaled in some practices of impoliteness. This study has identified thirteen realizations of impoliteness linguistically and behaviorally that indicate gender variations concerning the couple’s frequent impoliteness practices.

Self-Promotion and Identity Construction in Graduate Personal Statements

This qualitative corpus-based study investigates the first-person singular pronouns and their possessive determiners in graduate personal statements (PSs) that applicants use to create a self-promotional tenor in their statements. Data consisted on a corpus of 120 English and French PSs collected from four academic disciplines: Linguistics, Sociology, Engineering and Biology. The analysis has shown that the self-promotion strategy employed by the Anglo-American and French applicants shed light on the graduate students’ position and strengthen their identity in their statements. Further, the linguistic investigation revealed remarkable variations in using the self-mention signals across moves, disciplines and languages. With these findings, the study offered valuable theoretical and pedagogical implications regarding the linguistic features of the genre of PSs across various cultures, disciplines and institutional contexts. In addition, they underpin pedagogic self-promotional academic writings and shed light on using this genre as a potential pedagogical tool in classroom activities, particularly in ESL and EFL contexts.

LANGUAGE MEANS OF MEDICAL ADVERTISING DISCOURSE

The article updates the opinion of the relevance of a comprehensive study of the phonetic and lexical units functioning peculiarities in medical advertising discourse as a means to influence the consciousness of a potential consumer. The linguopragmatic orientation of linguistic means in the given discourse is revealed and their frequency of use in medical advertising texts is determined.
 It has been proven that phonetic and lexical means of expression have the significant suggestive potential for creating an effective advertising discourse. They are used to enhance the emotional impact of the advertising message, attract the attention of the addressee, and stimulate memorization of the content of the text. Due to phonostylistic means, a bright image of a medicine is created.
 The peculiarities of the phonetic means functioning were investigated through the analysis of the most common techniques: rhyme, alliteration, assonance, anaphora, epiphora, onomatopoeia, phonemic repetition, and anadiplosis. The features of the lexical means persuasive effect on the recipient are considered on the example of the most commonly used stylistic figures, namely: metaphor, metaphorization, epithet, comparison, antonyms, euphemisms, anaphora, epiphora, inversion, oxymoron, wordplay (pun), etc.
 It was established that phonetic and lexical means serve to achieve the advertiser's manipulative goal. The use of expressive techniques in medical advertising discourse is aimed at quick involuntary memorization of the advertised medicine. The phonostylistic means increase the expressiveness of the advertising text, stimulate the addressee's interest, contribute to the coherence of statements, and have a mnemonic and suggestive effect, which contributes to the realization of the addressee's motivational goal.
 The methodological basis of the research consists of descriptive, functional, structural and semantic, quantitative and statistical methods.
 More than 400 advertising texts from the Ukrainian mass media (television, Internet) and printed advertising publications (booklets, leaflets) became the material for linguistic investigation.

Building the Leeds Monolingual and Parallel Legal Corpora of Arabic and English Countries’ Constitutions: Methods, Challenges and Solutions

Arabic corpora have existed since the last decade of the past century. Although they are constantly increasing, more advanced tools and morpho-syntactically annotated Arabic corpora are still needed for research and teaching. Likewise, parallel and specialised corpora are rare despite the growing need to use them in empirical linguistic investigations of authentic Arabic texts and for language and translation teaching. Therefore, building legal corpora will pave the way for more research in Arabic legal translation, an area which is under-researched worldwide. This paper aims to discuss the building of a collection of specialised parallel and monolingual legal corpora. In particular, it will discuss the building of diachronic corpora, which include all available constitutions of 22 Arabic countries. The aim of building all available versions of these constitutions is two-fold: (1) interdisciplinary corpus-based and socio-cultural investigations and (2) research-led and blended-learning pedagogical approaches to translation teaching and learning. Thus, these corpora are of great value to translation trainers and researchers, law academics and professionals, and governmental, non-governmental and international organisations. The paper will demonstrate the process of building these specialised complex corpora and the challenges encountered throughout this process. Among the challenges faced during the data collection and processing phases are (1) limitations of finding the original constitutions for each Arabic country since some of them date back to 1922; (2) file conversion and the difficulty of choosing one Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool to rely on for the Arabic language since many lack accuracy, efficiency as well as encoding issues in Arabic.

The analysis of gestural and verbal pragmatic markers produced by Mild Cognitive Impaired participants during longitudinal and autobiographical interviews

ABSTRACT Context This corpus-based study presents a multimodal analysis of verbal pragmatic markers and non-verbal pragmatic markers in elderly people with Mild Cognitive Impairment aged over 75 years. Methods The corpus collection and analysis methodology has been described in the Belgian CorpAGEst transversal study and the French VintAGE longitudinal and transversal oriented pilot studies. The protocols are available online in both English and French. Results & Conclusion Our general findings indicate that with ageing, verbal pragmatic markers acquire an interactive function that allows people with MCI to maintain intersubjective relationships with their interlocutor. Furthermore, at the non-verbal level, gestural manifestations are increasingly used over time with a preference for non-verbal pragmatic markers with a referential function and an adaptive function. We aim to show the benefits of linguistic and interactional scientific investigation methods through cognitive impaired ageing for clinicians and family caregivers.

Colored Music in America: a Colored Sense of Belonging? A cultural-linguistic study of hip-hop music lyrics

As all people and nations experience a state of flux, national culture loses its solidity in the context of a global unified culture to which we are called, or rather forced, to belong. Here arise such vital questions as identity and belonging. The case study of this paper concerns the African-American sample as a minority group striving to seize its proper status in a ruthless West. This struggle comes highly significant when treading the edge of popular culture. The research is an inquiry into the extent to which belonging is felt, expressed and staged by the community in question throughout their representative popular culture, to mention hip-hop music. The complex nature of the topic requires, in fact, a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses, first, an anthropological examination of the backgrounds of the African-American ethnical group; second, a linguistic investigation of the African-American musical discourse (hip-hop lyrics); and third, a critical analytic deduction of the activist mission played by such musical genre concerning questions of identity and belonging. Practically speaking, the linguistic part will analyse a selected corpus of hip-hop song lyrics. The methodological process will use a qualitative content analysis technique to extract the linguistic patterns reinforcing the scope of identity and belonging. The concluding part will state some limitations that the research had encountered.

Homesign: Contested Issues

The term homesign has been used to describe the signing of deaf individuals who have not had sustained access to the linguistic resources of a named language. Early studies of child homesigners focused on documenting their manual communication systems through the lens of developmental psycholinguistics and generative linguistics, but a recent wave of linguistic ethnographic investigations is challenging many of the established theoretical presuppositions that underlie the foundational homesign research. Sparked by a larger critical movement within Deaf Studies led by deaf scholars, this new generation of scholarship interrogates how researchers portray deaf individuals and their communication practices and questions the conceptualization of language in the foundational body of homesign research. In this review, we discuss these contested issues and the current moment of transition within research on homesign.

Emotions in speech influence: a new key to the problem

The monography is analyzing that concerns the attempts of the author – as a result of many years of investigations in computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence – to formalize the processes of the Verbal Influence in communication. The review includes both theoretical and practice aspects of the description given by the author. The monography is regarded as the important input into the investigations in perlocutive linguistics.

A Semantic Study of the Word “Furqan” in Some Quaanic Selected Verses

It is worth mentioning that Semantics is the bridge by which meaning can be studied and texts can be understood and, finally, the intentions and implications of divine revelations can be discovered. The present study makes use of a methodical approach to deal with two essential issues: firstly, the semantic analysis of “Furqan” will be carried out in the context of the holy Quran’s verses by way of a semantic study based on the linguistic context and investigation of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships. Secondly, semantics will be deployed in reply to the skepticisms regarding the conceptualization of the word Furqan in the Holy Quran as stated in the book Letters for the Prophet Muhammad: A Research on the Roots of the Quran. In line with investigations, it can be said that Furqan was syntagmatically used with some words like piety and guidance and it was interchangeably used with words such as scale, Quran and the book. As a final definition of Furqan, we suggest that it is not of a lexical character and that it is by exercising the divine teachings that one might gain a “light” by means of which one can distinguish the right from the wrong and easily overcome the calamities and conspiracies of the time. Accordingly, the claim by the author of the book Letters for the Prophet Muhammad to the effect that the term “Furqan” refers to a book other than the present Quran is rejected.

A linguistic investigation of monosyllabic or masculine rhymes in Serbian poetry

This paper focuses on the prosodic properties of monosyllabic, that is, masculine rhymes in Serbian poetry. Word stress has been identified as a crucial prosodic feature of Serbian rhyme in general, and of masculine rhyme in particular, based on a quantitatively analyzed poetic database, which includes eight poets, four from the Romantic and four from the post-Romantic period. The role of stress is demarcative: it signals the beginning of the domain of rhyme, thereby considerably promoting its effectiveness. However, the presence of stress within the rhyme domain is not obligatory. The most effective are resonant rhymes, with demarcated domains in both lines, next in effectiveness are semi-resonant rhymes, with demarcation in only one of the lines, while nonresonant rhymes, which lack demarcation, are the least effective. Masculine rhymes are indistinct from feminine rhymes in terms of their prosodic organization, but differ significantly in terms of their linguistic realization. The lexical material provided by the Serbian grammatical system is only partially adequate for realizing masculine rhymes. The most effective resonant rhymes are formed exclusively by monosyllabic words, which are an extremely rare prosodic profile in the Serbian lexicon. On the other hand, the least effective nonresonant rhymes are exclusively formed by polysyllabic words, which are a dominant prosodic profile in the Serbian lexicon, but often yield infelicitous, barely recognizable rhymes. It is notable that masculine rhymes are not used by all poets in our database, which may well be due to the onerous lexical constraints on their formation. Masculine rhymes are in fact used by only four poets: three from the Romantic, and only one from the post-Romantic period.

НЕОТКРЫТЫЕ ТЕКСТЫ ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ ИЗГНАНИЯ: ТРАНСЛИНГВИЗМ И ВНУТРЕННИЙ ПЕРЕВОД НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ РОМАНА РОБЕРТА НОЙМАНА “CHILDREN OF VIENNA”

In the era of scholars’ growing interest in the phenomenon of translingual literature and recently emerged theory of inner translation, unfairly little attention is paid to the phenomenon of German exile literature, which is literature created by exiled authors in 1933–1945. This article analyses the novel “Children of Vienna” by R. Neumann, one of a few Austrian authors who fled fascist Germany. He managed to win recognition among critics and readers during his lifetime. The article evaluates the author’s internal translation from his mother German language into English. In conclusion the author of the article claims the value of Exilliteratur for diverse linguistic investigations.

A szövegbe illesztés módjai Szent István Veszprémi püspökségnek írt adománylevelében

Insertions in the Donation Letter to the Archdiocese of Veszprém from Stephen I of Hungary The original copy of Stephen I’s 1009 charter diploma establishing the Archdiocese of Veszprém has not survived; only interpolated versions with later modifications are available for research. As an interpolated charter diploma, the donation letter to the Archdiocese of Veszprém was relegated to the periphery of linguistic interest for a long time. Recently, however, the linguistic investigation of this donation letter has begun. This paper examines the methods of name choice and their insertion into the charter text. The author points out what new perspectives emerge in charter diploma analysis by applying this relatively recent approach and how examining the textual context assists interpretation and sheds light on unresolved issues. An analysis of name insertion methods contributes significantly to the evaluation of interpolated charter diplomas, to the distinction of chronological layers and ultimately, to the integration of new, early name records into the research into the relatively datadeficient initial phase of the Old Hungarian period.

A Critical Discourse Analysis Russophobia Rhetoric in UN Security Council's Speech by Antony J. Blinken

The purpose of this article is to explore Antony John Blinken's anti-Russian discourse that appeared in a speech at the 2022 UN Security Council after Russia invaded Ukraine. The discourse presented by Blinken implies various anti-Russian languages, especially in terms of security, namely the military. This study uses an ideological quadratic model under the umbrella of critical discourse studies using securitization theory combined with the concept of propaganda. Data collection, validation, and linguistic investigation are using the NVivo 12 Plus application and VOS Viewer. The data sources are literature studies through ebooks, news, and journals from Scopus and Google Scholar. The findings found that Blinken's propaganda scheme in his speech tried to portray Russia in negative terms. It is evident that many statements issued by Blinken discredit Russia and seem to regard Russia as a common enemy, with the invasion of Ukraine as a common latent danger.

Steps towards a Semantics of Dance

Abstract As formal theoretical linguistic methodology has matured, recent years have seen the advent of applying it to objects of study that transcend language, e.g., to the syntax and semantics of music (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983, Schlenker 2017a; see also Rebuschat et al. 2011). One of the aims of such extensions is to shed new light on how meaning is construed in a range of communicative systems. In this paper, we approach this goal by looking at narrative dance in the form of Bharatanatyam. We argue that a semantic approach to dance can be modeled closely after the formal semantics of visual narrative proposed by Abusch (2013, 2014, 2021). A central conclusion is that dance not only shares properties of other fundamentally human means of expression, such as visual narrative and music, but that it also exhibits similarities to sign languages and the gestures of non-signers (see, e.g., Schlenker 2020) in that it uses space to track individuals in a narrative and performatively portray the actions of those individuals. From the perspective of general human cognition, these conclusions corroborate the idea that linguistic investigations beyond language (see Patel-Grosz et al. forthcoming) can yield insights into the very nature of the human mind and of the communicative devices that it avails.

Picturesque Savagery on Display

Abstract This article discusses the importance of commercial exhibitions of Indigenous people in the development of anthropological practices in South America between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, it examines the intrinsic links between commercial ventures based on the exhibition of Indigenous people and anthropological practices. These spaces of scientific popularisation allowed the anthropologists to economise the time, economic, material and human resources involved in an excursion to the field in the classic sense. The article then presents and examines the anthropometric, linguistic, photographic and musicological investigations that the German anthropologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche (1872–1938) conducted between 1898 and 1904 on Selk'nam, Qom and Tehuelche groups exhibited in local and international commercial enterprises. Finally, through Lehmann-Nitsche's research, I explore of how European anthropologists profited from these commercial ventures for the study of indigenous people, the use of urban spaces for ‘fieldwork’ and their transformation into anthropological ‘laboratories’.

THE FORMAL AND SEMANTIC PROPERTIES OF INTERROGATIVE SENTENCES IN ALBANIAN AND GERMAN USAGE

This paper provides a comparison of two languages that are very distinct in grammar and pronunciation, respectively German and Albanian. Since research opportunities in comparative linguistics are infinite, this paper focuses on interrogative sentences and their sentence types. Through a detailed analysis of sentence examples of the grammar used in Albanian and German, we examine the similarities and differences related to different forms of interrogative sentences. As a framework for the classification of interrogative sentences in both languages, we have distinguished sentences into general interrogative sentences and complementary ones. In the end, the knowledge gained is summerised in a general overview. The aim of this work is to compare two languages that are very different in grammar, style and pronunciation, German and Albanian. Since the field of possible investigations in comparative linguistics is endless, the present work focuses on interrogative sentences and their respective linguistic forms. Through the detailed analysis of sentence examples, which are taken from common German and Albanian grammars, the similarities and differences in interrogative sentences are shown. The distinction between yes/no questions and questions that require a supplement serves as a regulatory framework. At the end of the work, the knowledge gained is summarized in an overview.

Political Linguistic Investigation of Illocutionary Forces In Theresa May’s Speech on Brexit

The purpose of this research is to investigate the illocutionary force uttered by Theresa May which focuses on political aspects in the context of Brexit and how the illocutionary force is responded by people. In conducting this research, qualitative research was used to describe two kinds of data: utterances containing illocutionary force in Theresa May’s speech on Brexit and responses to those illocutionary forces. The results of the research based on Theresa May’s speech on political aspects of Brexit are emphasized on the international relationship, law and regulation, geographical border, and government. The responses based on the illocutionary forces uttered by Theresa May in her speech on Brexit were to persuade British people that Brexit was right to do. Aside from that, it was used to relieve British’s fear towards Brexit. Those illocutionary forces were well inferred by the responders because the writer found the relevance between the illocutionary forces and its responses.