Linguistic Strata Research Articles

Speech errors in consecutive interpreting: Effects of language proficiency, working memory, and anxiety.

Interpreting can be seen as a form of language production, where interpreters extract conceptual information from the source language and express it in the target language. Hence, like language production, interpreting contains speech errors at various (e.g., conceptual, syntactic, lexical and phonological) levels. The current study delved into the impact of language proficiency, working memory, and anxiety on the occurrence of speech errors across these linguistic strata during consecutive interpreting from English (a second language) into Chinese (a first language) by student interpreters. We showed that speech errors in general decreased as a function of the interpreter's proficiency in the source (second) language and increased as a function of the interpreter's anxiety. Conceptual errors, which result from mistaken comprehension of the source language, decreased as a function of language proficiency and working memory. Lexical errors increased as a function of the interpreter's tendency of anxiety. Syntactic errors also decreased as a function of language proficiency and increased as a function of anxiety. Phonological errors were not sensitive to any of the three cognitive traits. We discussed implications for the cognitive processes underlying interpreting and for interpreting training.

Unveiling the Enigmatic Origins of Sardinian Toponyms

With the boom in Indo-European (IE) studies among linguists from the early 20th century, toponymic studies on European place names have been largely based on the Proto-Indo-European (PIE). However, historical and archaeological records of non-IE groups, such as the Nuragic civilization of Sardinia, have presented the possibility of pre-IE/non-IE (Paleo-Sardinian) linguistic stratum influences on certain toponyms in Sardinia, Italy. This article aims to present a meta-study on existing toponymic reconstructions theorized by scholars, while offering a fresh perspective by employing methods of historical phonetic chains and sequences analysis to identify toponyms of interest. Analysis showed that certain Sardinian toponyms contain striking phonetic sequences that are uncharacteristic of PIE, such as *s(a)rd-, *kar-, *-ini, *-ài/*-éi, *#[θ]-. Overall conclusions appear to display the merits of (1) PIE and (2) pre-IE/ non-IE theories. Both provide plausible toponymic reconstructions. (1) The accuracy of IE theories is brought into question, as they appear to rely heavily on phonetic links to existing PIE roots, sometimes with a lack of consideration for other contextual or hydro-geo-morphological factors. (2) Conversely, pre-IE/non-IE theories are found to be highly speculative due to the lack of historical data, and knowledge, about the Paleo-Sardinian language.

Towards a Language Map of Southern Hispania: Onomastic Arguments

Determining the languages spoken in the south of the Iberian Peninsula in antiquity, in pre-Roman times and during Romanization, is no easy task. Although we have an important corpus of indigenous inscriptions, the different writing systems identified have not been fully deciphered, which is especially true for the southern varieties of the complex Palaeohispanic family of scripts. This paper opens with a brief introduction to the different epigraphic areas of the southern Iberian Peninsula with a note to the special situation of the southwest, to offer an alternative look on the contours of “Tartessian” topographic layer. The author points out that the Tartessian label should be limited to a territory in a specific region of the central and lower Guadalquivir valley and that the region of southern Portugal (in the Algarve) where an important collection of about 100 large funerary stelae has been found, seems to be outside or at least on the periphery of the Tartessian world, even if these inscriptions are called “Tartessian” by many researchers. To date, there are different ways of interpreting the language(s) reflected in the southern epigraphic texts, especially those from the central and western regions of Andalusia and southern Portugal. The Iberian language inscriptions found in the southeast are comparatively better read and understood. The present paper seeks further arguments in the discussion of southern languages by analysing a set of onomastic elements (personal and place names) distributed over a wide region of the central and lower Guadalquivir valley and southern Portugal, attested in antiquity. Some conclusions are drawn as to what they may imply in terms of the linguistic map of the area, as well as in terms of the different linguistic strata during the centuries before the arrival of the Romans.

The pragmatism of drawing context networks

Abstract Linguistics has embraced the functional and contextual turn but, when building tools for systematic contextual description, we have not made as much use as we could of our own functional traditions. Rather, we have largely relied on the metaphors of law and rule, which do not adequately capture tensions between consistency and variability in how language and context relate to each other. Our aim in this paper is to show the economy and practicality of representing context as a pathway through a network, drawing on the network technique for mapping systems of grammatical choice introduced by Michael Halliday, and on its application to other linguistic strata first offered by Ruqaiya Hasan. The paper begins by outlining why alternative frameworks are needed for describing context-language relations. We then present a contextual network for one specific domain of the Systemic Functional Linguistic notion of Tenor, namely social distance, and use this to explore how different configurations of features of social distance influence the way that traditions of practice are passed on as a specialised legacy in two different professional collaborations. While the kind of context modelling discussed here is in a very early phase of development compared to phonetic, morphological and grammatical description, it has many advantages: contextual networks are paradigmatic in orientation; they help display and theorise metastability in language; they are “ad hoc” in Firth’s positive sense; and they constitute a proposal to be tested against observed behaviour within specific cultural and situational settings.

2. DESPITE SINGULARITY: THE EVENT AND ITS MANIFOLD STRUCTURES OF REPETITION

ABSTRACTThis article's principle interest is in the “structures of repetition” that characterize supposedly singular events. The starting point for the analysis is Reinhart Koselleck's discussion of the event in “Structures of Repetition in Language and History.” Koselleck perceived events as arising from metahistorical structures that characterize all human histories regardless of the eras in which they took place and are narrated. This article scrutinizes Koselleck's understanding of the event as well as the underlying “structures of repetition” shaping it. In considering the question of the temporality of the event, this article distinguishes three strata of repetitive structures. First, it examines a seemingly trivial historiographical structure of repetition of the event, which is the iterative proclamation of the return of the event. It then analyzes Koselleck's foundational, yet rarely truly appreciated, “Structures of Repetition in Language and History” and maps out the fundamental structures of repetition, which are the conditions of possibility of events. Finally, it hints at a further linguistic stratum of repetitive structures. In light of growing interest in Koselleck's work in both German and Anglophone historiography, this article systematizes the manifold structures of repetition against the backdrop of current explorations of the event's temporality, thus surveying a facet of Koselleck's pioneering work that is too often forgotten.

Funcionamiento democrático y ABP: factores determinantes para la inclusión y el rendimiento del alumnado

Este trabajo analiza cómo el funcionamiento democrático y la metodología basada en proyectos (ABP) influyen en el rendimiento del alumnado. Se relacionan las evidencias descritas en la literatura científica sobre la mejora del rendimiento y la inclusión con los resultados logrados por el alumnado de Antzuola en las pruebas de diagnóstico realizadas por el Instituto Vasco de Investigación Educativa. La perspectiva metodológica desde la cual se afronta el estudio es cuantitativa; se comparan los resultados de los años 2010, 2011 y 2013 del alumnado de Antzuola con el alumnado de la Comunidad Autónoma Vasca –que realizaron las mismas pruebas en diferentes centros y estratos lingüísticos. El estudio concluye que las prácticas educativas desarrolladas en el centro generan mejores resultados académicos, mostrando un porcentaje significativamente menor de alumnos con resultados por debajo de la media, lo que puede ser entendido como un mayor nivel de inclusión.

Не подмажешь — не поедешь: лексическая репрезентация темы взяточничества в русском языке

The problem of description of the social vocabulary functioning in different linguistic strata in certain historical periods is considered on the example of the lexical representations of the topic of bribery in the Russian language. The relevance of the study is determined by the lack of a comprehensive description of the vocabulary of social interaction, including institutional relations, the scope of which includes bribery. It is shown that in the vocabulary of the Russian language this topic is represented by words, idioms and non-idiomatic expressions, as well as proverbs that reflect the perceptions of Russian native speakers of one of the parts of social interaction of citizens and government members. 312 linguistic facts, containing semes ‘bribery’, which are included in the structure of the meanings of the words that constitute the lexical-semantic field “Bribery” are identified. Ideographic net is developed, which determines the structure and composition of the field. It is noted that the semantic field center is the ideogram “the custom of taking bribes”; its key lexical represent is the noun bribery . The idea about this phenomenon as about custom is stated. Interpretive analysis of the contexts in which you use this concept is made. Based on the analysis it is concluded that proverbs objectify semantic components of the concept of custom: identifying, regulating, etc.

Towards a clarification of the history of the Slovene river name Soča

The etymology of the Slovene hydronym Soča (Standard Friulan Lusìnç, Italian Isonzo) was satisfactorily elucidated more than half a century ago. The overall idea that the river name goes back to a derivative of a Proto-Indo-European verbal root *H1eisH2- is undoubtedly correct (the exact meaning of the root in question has, however, not been sufficiently corroborated) but the details remain hopelessly obscure. Given the contemporary reflexes of the underlying name (viz. Friulan Lusìnç ~ dial. Lisùns etc.) and the sometimes conflicting or not at all easily reconcilable historical attestations (spanning nearly a millenium), no consensus can in fact be reached about the exact formal means involved in the derivation of the original deverbative formation – a fact which results from the overall inconvenience of sheer wealth of combinatorial possibilities that go hand in hand with the general ambiguity of the phonology more or less directly reflected by the later reflexes of the name. The present contribution is an attempt at unifying all the reliable data at our disposal into a coherent picture that would bring a satisfactory answer as to the exact phonological and morphological make-up of the pre-historic source (alongside with the reconstructed meaning) and its subsequent history as it passed through the various linguistic strata.

Assia Djebar: Patterns of Resistance

Research Article| January 01 2015 Assia Djebar: Patterns of Resistance Madeleine Dobie Madeleine Dobie Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Romanic Review (2015) 106 (1-4): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-106.1-4.1 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Madeleine Dobie; Assia Djebar: Patterns of Resistance. Romanic Review 1 January 2015; 106 (1-4): 1–5. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-106.1-4.1 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRomanic Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2015 The Trustees of Columbia University2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Models of the bilingual lexicon and their theoretical implications for CLIL

Although many advances have been made in recent years concerning the theoretical dimensions of content and language integrated learning (CLIL), research still has to meet the necessity to come up with integrative models that adequately map the interrelation between content and language learning in CLIL contexts. This article will suggest that recent models of the bilingual lexicon make a fruitful starting point for this purpose, because they stress the close interrelation between conceptual and linguistic strata. Besides a language-specific conceptual dimension, these models cater for developmental aspects of extension and restructuring of cognitive concepts, including a reciprocal relationship between L1, L2 and the conceptual dimension. Such a differentiated understanding of the cognitive structures underlying student performances is suggested as an appropriate basis for pedagogically appropriate intervention.

Etymological Analysis of Toponyms from Ptolemy's Description of Central Europe

Ptolemy was not the first classical author to describe Central Europe, and the territory of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia in particular. The importance of his work is rather concerned with a list of toponyms he recorded, around thirty items altogether, attested from the middle of the second century AD or earlier, which can all more or less be related to this territory. This contribution presents an analysis of the toponyms mentioned in Ptolemy’s list on the diachronic basis. For our purposes, the so-called Old European linguistic stratum is presented as the most archaic, from which we then move on to the Celtic one and then on to Germanic. The present etymological analysis is yet very tentative and reflects the attempts of the so-called first approximation. But even regarding the preliminary character of the etymologies discussed in the sections 3 and 4, it is obvious that for most of them (21 out of 28, i.e. ¾) the Celtic etymological derivation seems most probable. In four cases the Germanic etymological derivation seems more preferable, in three other cases the Germanic adaptation of the originally Celtic toponyms is indicated by Lautverschiebung (Grimm’s Law). Summing up, the sources of Ptolemy’s information reflect a relatively strong Celtic tradition in the area, which was still able to compete with the arising Germanic tradition.

The Poetics of Schadenfreude : N. B. Minkov on the Edge of Yiddish Diction

Nokhum Borukh Minkov (1893–1958), best known today as a literary critic and historian, was also a talented poet and co-founder of the Introspectivist movement (Inzikh) in Yiddish poetry in New York. The poetry created under the banner of this movement to whose ideas Minkov remained committed throughout his poetic career was full of complicated rhythmic schemes, kaleidoscopic imagery, and vibrant sound- and wordplay. In keeping with part of the Introspectivist program Minkov's poetry was keenly sensitive to the cultural resonances of Yiddish's linguistic strata and manipulated them to great effect. I will focus my attention on one especially resonant element daytshmerish, or spotlit Germanisms as a point of access to Minkov's poetic project. This essay aims to provide not only an analysis of the permutations of the emblematic use of both the word and the concept of Schadenfreude as the Germanism par excellence in Minkov's poetry, but offers that discussion as a way of understanding the significance of Introspectivist poetry in the interbellum period and the fraught relationship of Yiddish to German after the Holocaust.

Standard Chinese and the Xining dialect

Xining, the capital of Qinghai province, is an especially valuable location for observing the spread and influence of Standard Chinese, or Putonghua, for at least two reasons. First, the dialect’s history of contact with non-Sinitic languages, mostly Tibetan and Mongolic languages, created an older linguistic stratum that differs markedly from other Mandarin dialects, indeed with most all Chinese dialects, in clearly identifiable ways, so that comparisons between Standard Chinese and variations within the Xining dialect reflect unambiguous cases of standard cum dialect language contact. Second, the demographic history of the region, including large-scale migrations of Chinese-speaking people from other provinces, created a socio-cultural context in which the promotion of Standard Chinese would likely find fertile ground. This paper will show that the combination of these two factors has created a situation in which the old Xining dialect is rapidly disappearing. In its place is not Standard Chinese, per se, but an interdialect, a compromise variety stripped of the most obvious dialect features but clearly distinct from Standard Chinese. The differences will be shown to exist in the phonology, lexicon and syntax of the dialect and that the more highly educated members of the community are leading the changes toward the New Xining dialect. While Standard Chinese is shown to have been a powerful force in the creation the New Xining dialect, it has not completely replaced the local dialect.

The Earliest English Place Names in North East Scotland

This paper is intended to present the results and highlight some of the problems of a preliminary exploration of the beginnings of a linguistic stratum in the placenomenclature of a region.1 For want of a better term this 'region' will be designated conventionally North East Scotland or the Scottish north-east, for our purposes, its heartland is understood to consist of Aberdeenshire , Banffshire and Moray but in addition the Mearns to the south of the Dee (now officially, though not historically, part of Aberdeenshire ) and the former county of Nairn to the west of Moray will also be included in this survey. There might have been considerable justification in extending our investigation southwards to include Angus because of its geographic proximity to and early historical associations with the Mearns but such expansion would have made what is, in its design, only an initial foray into an almost unexplored toponymic field of study much less manageable on the one hand, and would detract from, or even distort, our intended concentration on what is usually perceived as the Scottish North East proper, on the other. The focal urban area of Angus is, after all, Dundee, and not Aberdeen. It must nevertheless be admitted that there is a certain arbitrariness about the concept of the 'North East' employed in this study and that the 'region' as a whole is not as cohesive as would have been desirable. Like the rest of Scotland, its north-eastern parts are, in contrast to the emigrations of more recent centuries, pre-historically a region of immigrants, though they do not reflect all the waves that reached the Scottish shores in the last 3000 years or so in their linguistic stratification. As is to be expected, the least tangible of these strata are often the earliest ones since all we have to go by is toponymic, especially hydronymic, evidence. This consists of two distinct kinds which may have existed sequentially or simultaneously. In the first place, Ptolemy's 'map' of Scotland records on the basis of their latitude and longitudes nver names like Loxa, Tuesis and Caelis (for Kailos), all of them seemingly applying to water courses draining into the Moray Firth.2 In spite of several scholarly attempts3 and others not so scholarly, identifying, for example, the Loxa with the Lossie, and the Tuesis with the Spey, none of these can be uncontroversially matched with any of the rivers and their names, as we have them today, either by location or by linguistic form. In addition, there is the name of the major river in the more westerly areas of the region, the Spey, which has never been satisfactorily explained4 and may also belong to a stratum of river names the linguistic origins of which are unknown to us. 5 Secondly, there are some equally ancient river names, like the Nairn, the [Find]horn, the [Dev]eron, and possibly also the [Auld]ear« which can be associated with a pre-Celtic Indo-European stratum, such as the socalled Old European hydronymy of the European Bronze Age in which we find several identical equivalents.6 The oldest properly identifiable place names in the north-east belong to a p-Celtic

A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English (review)

Hebrew Studies 31 (1990) 188 Reviews address. If we want to know something about the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud. we shall have to describe the Babylonian Talmud and its paramount traits of rhetoric and logic and determine whether it is a compilation or a well-crafted composition. working our way from the outside to the inside. In starting from the smallest whole units of thought. the individual sentences. Kalmin has replicated an error of several generations' standing. The utterly useless result. comprising made-up words that only the author and his six best friends use anyhow. is yet one more cost exacted by the rather aimless and self-referential (not to say self-serving) program of academic isolates in rabbinical seminaries. This is what emerges when scholars talk entirely to themselves and listen to no one else. The difference between Kalmin's version of "the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud" and an academic reading of the same problem is the difference between Nintendo baseball and the kind you play on a real baseball diamond. Jacob Neusner University ofSouth Florida Tampa, FL 33620 A COMPREHENSIVE ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF THE HEBREW LANGUAGE FOR READERS OF ENGLISH. By Ernest Klein. pp. xix +721. New York: Macmillan, 1987. Cloth. This well-bound. one-volume work with easy-to-read print in threecolumn pages represents a fme publishing job by Macmillan and an excellent scholarly project by Ernest Klein. The thirty thousand or so Hebrew entries appear in boldface Hebrew characters followed by the part of speech and the linguistic stratum from which the entry stems. The various meanings numbered consecutively come next and then a concise etymology. Finally, a listing of derivatives is presented. In the case of verbs, the stem appears followed by all existing verb patterns (binyanim) with the appropriate meaning of each. This work, purporting to be A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary , has a few significant deficiencies. The five strata identified by Klein from which the entry words derive are "Biblical," "Post Biblical," "Medieval," and "New Hebrew," as well as "Foreign Words." There is no further explanation. definition, or discussion of these categories! As promised in the flyleaf, one would expect to trace in a comprehensive etymological dictionary "the way its vocabulary has changed in meaning Hebrew Studies 31 (1990) 189 Reviews and in usage over the centuries." The etymological infonnation presented. however. is too scanty for this. There are no quotations showing the forms. usages of the words. changes in senses. nor dates of the usages. Solely in the case of New Hebrew words is there a specification beyond mere defmition. If the creator of an entry word is known. Klein includes a note like the following which appears for P':Jo: "[coined by Eliezer ben Yehudah (1853-1922) ...]!. But even in such cases. Klein does not cite the original quotation carrying the word. nor any early quotation with it. or any example of its usage. For all strata Klein does adduce the stem in cognate languages together with the meaning of the stem in these languages. All words from languages other than Hebrew. Aramaic. and Yiddish are printed in Roman characters and translated into English. Klein also provides the various translations of a word if these differ in Biblical. Post Biblical. Medieval. or New Hebrew. This reviewer finds the contemporary language aspect of the dictionary the weakest. Klein·s knowledge is broad. and his analyses are accurate. The representation of New Hebrew and Foreign Words in the present-day language appears distorted. Although Hebrew stemming from earlier strata is presented well. a plethora of common. everyday words in current usage from the New Hebrew stratum are conspicuously missing. Indeed. a multivolume dictionary cannot include all the words of the Hebrew language in all its periods. much less a one-volume work. Nevertheless. the claim that "in this dictionary. the vocabulary of present-day Hebrew is covered thoroughly:· leads one to wonder at the omission of certain entries (e.g.• l'='mt, ll,at, iTOl, I!)~:JC, ppo. iTllU:lo. ~£). p~-p'~). In the case of iTel one is particularly puzzled because the entry iTOU with the plene spelling is followed by "see iT'il~." Klein does include other foreign...

On the eliminatibility of ideal linguistic entities

With reference to Polish logico-philosophical tradition two formal theories of language syntax have been sketched and then compared with each other. The first theory is based on the assumption that the basic linguistic stratum is constituted by object-tokens (concrete objects perceived through the senses) and that the types of such objects (ideal objects) are derivative constructs. The other is founded on an opposite philosophical orientation. The two theories are equivalent. The main conclusion is that in syntactic researches it is redundant to postulate the existence of abstract linguistic entities. Earlier, in a slightly different form, the idea was presented in [27] and signalled in [26] and [25].

Huellas de griego preoccidental en la toponimia de Acaya

A study of some Achaean toponyms presenting linguistic features not proper of Western Greek. They prove that in this region there is a linguistic stratum akin to the Mycenaean dialect and those that preceded Arcadian and Ionic-Attic.

The structure of Maltese: A study in mixed grammar and vocabulary.

Maltese is a separate language resulting from the interaction and fusion of North-African Arabic Siculo-Italian, covering two different cultural strata. The Arabic element in Maltese very often corresponds to the Anglo-Saxon in English, while the Romance loans correspond to the Norman-French element. Also as in English, the primitive linguistic stratum is confined mainly to the description of the obvious facts of Nature and the Individual's reactions to them while the abstract and progressive vocabulary of the intelligentsia belongs to later times. The result of this fusion is a mixed grammar and vocabulary as we shall show when studying the structure of spoken Maltese. In order to be able to distinguish the two elements, we have established a series of descriptive criteria that together make possible a detailed phonological analysis of the language. The thesis begins with a description of Maltese sounds, followed by Phonology, where these criteria are based on a study of the Vowels, their quantity, position and sequences; the semi vowel, the diphthongs, their position, stress, the consonants, their sequences including initial groups in phonological junction (zero vowel). In Morphology the words are studied as patterns, with particular attention to the formal arrangement of the consonants and the correlative vowels which are described in their various semantic changes with lists of examples from spoken and archaic Maltese. In both parts the two elements have been treated separately but under Semitic Maltese are treated those words which have been assimilated partially or completely to a Semitic pattern. Words which have not been so assimilated are of course treated under the head of Romance Maltese.