Linguistic Traditions Research Articles

Metaphor and Metonymy in Public “Linguistic” Discussions: The Case of Female Surnames in Contemporary Czech

Abstract Czech is a flective Slavic language that traditionally expresses gender in female surnames by suffixation. The formation of female surnames of Czech citizens is regulated by Czech law. The surnames and the related law repeatedly attract the attention of non-linguists and are discussed in the public arena. The study analyses metaphors and metonymies used in these discussions involving non-linguists. The data for the analysis are collected from public discourse, especially from newspapers and magazines. Although the main topic of the public discussions is “linguistic”, the material reveals much about Czech speakers’ understanding of other, non-linguistic topics, such as the role of the state, state legislation, and personal freedom of choice. The discussions show parts of the folk theory of language as well. The repertoire of metaphors and metonymies used in the discussions is rich and it concerns three main target domains (language; law and the state; discussion and argumentation). Many non-linguists who participate in this type of public discussion today tend to see individual freedom as more important than any linguistic tradition.

Die Geschichte(n) gefalteter Bücher. Leporellos, Livres-accordéon und Folded Panoramas in Literatur und bildender Kunst. [The (Hi)stories of Folded Books. Leporellos, Livres-accordéon, and Folded Panoramas in Literature and the Visual Arts.

Die Geschichte(n) gefalteter Bücher. Leporellos, Livres-accordéon und Folded Panoramas in Literatur und bildender Kunst. [The (Hi)stories of Folded Books. Leporellos, Livres-accordéon, and Folded Panoramas in Literature and the Visual Arts.

How weak are Romanian clitic pronouns?

In traditional linguistics, pronouns are divided into two classes: those that can bear word stress, coined “strong”, “full” or “tonal”, and those that cannot, coined “weak”, “clitic”, or “atonal”. However, in the last decades, research on this topic has shown that items generally labeled as clitics are far more complex. Somewhere between words and affixes, these hybrid linguistic entities challenge both description and modeling. As for Romanian, the debate on weak (i.e., clitic) pronouns has been dominated by the question of their categorial status: are these items clitics or affixes? In this article, I present and scrutinize different approaches that support the claim that there are differences between proclitics and enclitics, i.e., between clitics occurring before vs. after the verb; this includes not only positional, but also featural differences. I identify various types of ambiguities in Romanian that could lead to improper data interpretation, and, based on an analysis of syllabicity – the most salient feature of Romanian weak pronouns – I refute claims for treating clitics in preverbal position differently than in postverbal position. Furthermore, using evidence from both historical data and data pertaining to language varieties, I show regularities in the Romanian weak pronoun system, bringing evidence against the claim that Romanian weak pronouns show a great deal of idiosyncrasies.

Podcasting the Global South: Radio Ambulante’s “Latin American Stories” and the Re-Making of a Transnational Latin/x Narrative Sphere

This essay examines the content, production, and distribution of Radio Ambulante, the multilingual Spanish-language podcast hosted by novelist Daniel Alarcón (2012-present), within the context of entrenched US/Latin America media industry divides. While transnational approaches to studying and understanding US Latinx media—particularly literature—have dominated the field since at least the turn of the twenty-first century, contemporary Spanish-language or multilingual Latin/x media remains largely marginalized. By examining Radio Ambulante within Alarcón’s trajectory as a novelist, US Latinx and Latin American literary histories, and the changing Latin/x media landscape, I show how the podcast’s intermixing of literary and linguistic traditions as well as media platforms indexes an expanding Global South Latin/x narrative sphere. Further, while Spanish-language, pan-American intellectual and literary movements have historically been male and upper-class dominant, Radio Ambulante attempts to counter this bias through its multilingual content and resources and its training for Latin/x producers and journalists, possibly shifting this narrative sphere in even more significant ways.

ЮРИДИЧНА ТЕРМІНОЛОГІЯ В ПАРАДИГМІ СУЧАСНИХ ПЕРЕКЛАДОЗНАВЧИХ АСПЕКТІВ

The article has a review character and is dedicated to modern research in the field of legal translation. The main tasks of the translator and the problems that arise during the translation of jurisprudence are considered. The analysis of the material suggests that legal translations are mainly performed by professionals who have obtained a legal education. Texts in the source and target languages are treated in completely different legal systems, which substantiates the use of different wording for each language. It has been determined that, at the same time, these references must be clear to both parties and have the same meaning. The authors accentuate the necessity for translator to possess the knowledge of the laws of their country as well as the ones of the country in which the source language is used. All these factors together determine the specifics of legal translation and indicate that the legal field requires special accuracy and deep knowledge from translators; the legal field is one of the most difficult one for them. During the analysis, we determined that the most common problems faced by legal translation specialists are as follows: the lack of deep knowledge in the researched field, differences in the legal systems and linguistic traditions of countries, and an insufficient number of widespread stable word combinations alongside their corresponding target word combinations.

THE CHANGES OF SOCIAL EMOTION AND BEHAVIOR IN LETTERS IN THE QING DYNASTY AND ITS ACADEMIC CONNOTATION

BackgroundThe functions and characteristics of letters used for information exchange determine that they have occupied a place in the ancient academic history since their birth. As the academic summary period of the Qing Dynasty, the content of the letter turned to theory. Scholars exchange academic and textual research on classics and history through letters. And this research is helpful to analyze the regulation of information on modern people's emotional anxiety.Research Objects and MethodsThis paper mainly selects 6862 academic letters from the Qing Dynasty in the 18th century, of which 3060 involve textual research. According to the specific vocabulary categories and materials involved, it is divided into 8 sub categories for quantitative and qualitative analysis. The results show that through examples, lists and textual research, the main materials of academic letters in the Qianjia period highlight the academic value of analyzing letters in the Qing Dynasty from the aspects of corpus, philology, linguistics and history. The data of this paper mainly comes from the letters from 1700 to 1800 in the collection of poetry and prose of the Qing Dynasty. The standard of material selection is whether literature, language and textual research are involved. At the same time, the communication anxiety scale is also used. The Interaction Anxiety Scale (IAS) [17] compiled by Leary is used. There are 15 questions, a single dimension, and a 5-level score. From 1 to 5, it means “very inconsistent” to “very consistent”. The higher the score, the greater the degree of social anxiety.ResultsThe Qing Dynasty Correspondence corpus has objectivity, authenticity, richness and particularity; It embodies the value of text collation in philology; In linguistics, it embodies the value of the combination of theory and textual research practice, and the combination of point and aspect; In history, it embodies the value of mutual proof of historical facts. The practice of letter vocabulary textual research can be combined with the achievements of modern language research to provide information supplement for language research. The exegetical achievements of academic letters in the Qing Dynasty are an important part of the achievements of traditional linguistics. Among them, the most discussive and characteristic is the textual research on Jingchu vocabulary and its related problems. Collating and studying the contents of lexical textual research involved in Qianjia academic letters can not only provide theories and methods for the comprehensive study of lexicology, but also provide reference for the textual research of letters in the Qing Dynasty and other periods. At the same time, the social anxiety of letters was the independent variable, and aggression and depression were the dependent variables. When the self-efficacy of managing depression / pain was the mediating variable, the total effects of mediating effect were 40.61% and 34.06% respectively; When the self-efficacy of managing anger / anger was the mediating variable, the total mediating effect was 55.77% and 31.81% respectively.Conclusionthe letters of the Qing Dynasty in the 18th century can make up for the lack of monographs and historical materials and return the literature to its original truth; It helps to outline the trend of Confucianism in the Qing Dynasty, improve the academic pedigree of people in the Qing Dynasty, provide necessary language support for the research of academic history, cultural history and other disciplines, and promote the in-depth development of literature collation and collation. To sum up, the emotional regulation of ancient people through ancient letters is also conducive to the mental health of contemporary people.AcknowledgementsSupported by The arrangement and research of the vocabulary interpretive materials in the Academic letters of scholars in Qing Dynasty (21BYY144).

“I think I belong over there”

Abstract Experiences of belonging and unbelonging are constructed in multiple ways. Two young women share their stories of moving from north to south and their experiences of (un)belonging in the United States and Mexico. Analysis of the semi-structured interviews through interdisciplinary lenses highlights the contested nature of borders and the breaking down of pre-established categories. Beyond territorial borders, the experiences of these two US citizens of Mexican heritage reveal an ongoing negotiation of spatial, social and linguistic border spaces, blurring the distinctions between the two nationalities, multiple social groups, and the linguistic traditions to which they (choose to) belong. Different layers of identity and grounds for belonging intersect in the stories they tell. While family priorities and financial realities condition their choices and their mobility, the stories reveal agency and active (un)bordering on multiple scales, also exemplifying the potential of (un)bordering across academic disciplines.

Women (Re)Writing Milton

Women (Re)Writing Milton

Дескриптивізм і прескриптивізм у китайській традиції кодифікації мов веньян і байхуа

This article analyzes in detail the mechanisms and concepts of the codification of the language norms of the ancient Chinese language in the historical perspective in the light of the problem of coexistence, interaction, development of several immanent linguistic categories. The ratio of descriptive and prescriptive approaches in the processes of codification of the ancient Chinese language, the study of dominant and peripheral approaches to the fixation of linguistic phenomena, the analysis of extralinguistic factors influencing the formation of the language, allow us to understand and explain the linguistic phenomena of the modern Chinese language. The formation of a speech norm through codification processes was caused by a whole range of factors: a political factor (the need for the consolidation of society, the formation of statehood and national identity); socio-economic (urbanization, communication and, as a result, social mobility of the population); cultural (correspondence of the processes of formation and selection of language norms to the ideas of the ruling ethical and philosophical trends, linguistic ideology and the aesthetic canon of their time). In this article, the terms “prescription”, “language codification” are considered in the context of the Chinese philological tradition, primarily in their relationship with the term’s “description”, as well as “language norm”. The codifiers of the ancient Chinese language are represented by various types of dictionaries, and most linguistic studies were carried out to reveal the original meaning of a certain hieroglyph, and not to establish the role of the processes of description and prescription in the selection of linguistic phenomena for the formation of a speech norm. In particular, the study carried out in this article aims to fill this gap and offer answers to questions about the factors of influence and methods for selecting the language norm in the Old Chinese language.

On Structural Particles in Sinitic Languages: Typology and Diachrony

In the Chinese linguistic tradition, the term ‘structural particle(s)’ (jiégòu zhùcí 结构助词) is used to refer to functional elements that mainly act as markers of adnominal modification, nominalisation, adverbial modification and in the so-called verb complement constructions. In Standard Mandarin, the three commonly used structural particles are all realised as /tə/, but they are written with different characters (的, 地 and 得), which somehow reflect their distinct origins. However, the same functions are mapped onto different markers in other Sinitic languages, and each of the functions listed above may be associated to more than one construction. In this paper, we provide an overview of the range of variation in the domain of structural particles in Sinitic, based on the analysis of a convenience sample of 77 Chinese dialects. We highlight some areal and genealogical trends in the distribution of these forms, and we discuss some hypotheses on their origins and on their evolution: specifically, we focus on the markers of adnominal and adverbial modification. We argue that markers of adnominal and adverbial modification may sometimes arise from different sources and undergo formal merger, due to structural analogy and/or to phonetic similarity.

ЗА ПРЕДИКАЦИЯТА ПРИ НЕРАЗЧЛЕНИМИТЕ ИЗРЕЧЕНИЯ / ON THE PREDICATION IN ONE-WORD SENTENCES IN BULGARIAN

The paper focuses on certain aspects of the predication in some one-word sentences in Bulgarian. Such sentences are communicative units which have no distinct main constituents but are still able to express thoughts, ideas, etc. The study addresses the issue of whether certain units considered to be one-word sentences according to the linguistic tradition can actually be analysed as elliptical sentences or at least as one-word sentences whose predicative centre consists of at least one main constituent that is retrievable from the context. The analysis of the empirical material shows that syncretic predication may prove a rarer linguistic phenomenon than is usually assumed. Keywords: syncretic predication, one-word sentences, affirmative, negative and imperative one-word sentences

Репрезентация ценностных доминант в английских лексических образованиях с фокусной семой REALITY и их передача на русский язык (на материале произведения А. Мердок “The Bell” / «Колокол»)

The aim of the study is to analyse the degree of successful adapting of the cultural dominants of the English language presented in the lexical formations of A. Murdoch’s literary work “The Bell”. The article investigates and analyses the statements with the focus semantic construct REALITY as the most typical of A. Murdoch’s early works. The scientific novelty lies in the application of the anthropocosmist approach to the study of cultural value dominants, which is fundamentally new in the modern linguistic tradition as it makes possible to objectively analyse the manifestation of the cultural value dominants of the original text in its translation into Russian. As a result, the semantic potential of the focus seme REALITY in English has been determined, the main cultural and value dominants presented in the statements of this semantic field in the text of A. Murdoch’s novel “The Bell” have been identified, and the main solutions used to adequately translate them into Russian have been considered.

On the Russophone and Anglophone linguistic traditions

Dans la description linguistique, la structure de la langue maternelle du linguiste joue un rôle important qui n’est pas toujours pris en compte : « Lorsqu’un linguiste passe des descriptions de sa langue maternelle à la mise en place d’une théorie générale de la langue, les notions essentielles de la théorie qu’il a bâtie conservent bien souvent un lien étroit avec des faits qui sont bien représentés dans sa langue maternelle » (A. A. Zalizniak & T. V. Padutcheva). Intervient ensuite un processus de sens inverse : la théorie mise en place amène le linguiste à un certain regard sur la langue, et c’est pourquoi en linguistique les langues étrangères se voient attribuer en permanence les particularités de la langue maternelle du linguiste. Du point de vue typologique la langue russe n’a pas tellement changé par comparaison avec les anciennes langues indo-européennes et sur le plan de ses structures est restée de type synthétique. C’est la raison pour laquelle la tradition russe, tout comme la tradition antique, est basée sur l’idée d’un rôle central de la morphologie et de la formation des mots dans la grammaire. Mais, de l’avis, par exemple, de A. Meillet, un tel type morphologique « est extraordinairement particulier et en même temps extrêmement complexe ». La tradition anglaise attribue de même un rôle principal dans la grammaire non pas à la formation des mots, mais à l’ordre des divers éléments.

The reception of European typological language classification among the Turkish language reformers of 1932-1936

The fact that the Turkish language was classified as an agglutinative language bythe traditional European linguistics was accepted, but also challenged by the Turkish language reformers of the 1930s. The underlying reason was that most classifications of the language families were influenced by harsh judgments about the cultural and intellectual level of its speakers as well as on the capability of those languages. Interestingly, the Turks did not question this kind of prejudices towards non-Indo-European languages and their speakers, but they tried to solve this “problem” at alinguistical-theoretical level. There were diverse attempts to deal with this issue, especially between 1932 and 1936.

Anna Frajlich: Departures, Returns, Memory

Anna Frajlich: Departures, Returns, Memory

Sociocultural features of the Arabic academic discourse

The Arabic academic discourse is a complex organism associated with the linguistic, national, cultural and religious characteristics of the inhabitants of the Middle East. The article is interdisciplinary in nature and can be considered from the point of view of sociolinguistics, comparative linguistics and psycholinguistics. The subject of the study is the social and cultural features of the Arabic academic discourse. The object of research is academic discourse implemented in Arabic. The purpose of this article is to identify the key features of the Arab academic discourse and the degree of influence of globalization on it. The methodological basis of the study was the results of a survey of Arabic–speaking native students studying at the bachelor's and master's degrees in the Levant countries. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the Arabic academic discourse in the Russian and international linguistic tradition is insufficiently studied, which entails communicative failures between communicants within the framework of Arabic academic discourse and global, international academic discourse. As a result of the study, the authors come to the conclusion that the Arabic academic discourse is a synthesis of traditional, national and religious foundations of the Arabic-speaking society; the teacher in the Arabic academic discourse takes an authoritarian position towards students. The research materials can be used in universities of the humanities in the study of special courses on intercultural communication, discoursology and a practical course of the Arabic language.

The linguopoetics of D. V. Grigorovich’s short novel "The Peasant" in the context of the linguistic tradition of the 19th–20th century Russian literature (to the 200th anniversary of the birth)

This linguopoetic study of D. V. Grigorovich’s short novel "The Peasant" aims to identify features specific to the author’s creative writing style and trace the connections between the text and the linguistic and stylistic traditions of Russian literature in different epochs. The research subject is all constituents of the linguopoetic fabric of the work of art under consideration. These are linguistic units, compositional elements, stylistic devices, plot-building ideas, images, and motifs. The methods include observation, cross sampling, generalisation, linguistic material classification, and establishing the content, structural, stylistic identity of different texts. These methods helped to identify and describe the techniques of creating the lyrical context in the short novel, the place of precedent images in it, the role of syntactical parallelisms and comparisons, the functions of low colloquial and dialectal inclusions, the origins and significance of the stylistic register dynamism. The approaches of modern linguistic poetics combined with certain methods of cultural linguistics (linguoculturology), psycholinguistics, and linguistic folkloristics (linguofolkloristics) enabled the author to analyse the specific features of objectifying the Russian peasantry’s customs, superstitious, and popular beliefs in the text of the short novel. Additionally, the research paper presents some psychological phenomena, the sensory field, and the recreation of the Russian people’s cultural and linguistic picture of the world. In the course of the study, the influence of Grigorovich’s artistic heritage on the literary and stylistic context of the subsequent time (i. e. the writers creating on the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries, the writers of the Silver Age of Russian literature as well as the "Village" Prose writers of the Soviet period) was determined.

Historical Linguistics of Sign Languages: Progress and Problems.

In contrast to scholars and signers in the nineteenth century, William Stokoe conceived of American Sign Language (ASL) as a unique linguistic tradition with roots in nineteenth-century langue des signes française, a conception that is apparent in his earliest scholarship on ASL. Stokoe thus contributed to the theoretical foundations upon which the field of sign language historical linguistics would later develop. This review focuses on the development of sign language historical linguistics since Stokoe, including the field's significant progress and the theoretical and methodological problems that it still faces. The review examines the field's development through the lens of two related problems pertaining to how we understand sign language relationships and to our understanding of cognacy, as the term pertains to signs. It is suggested that the theoretical notions underlying these terms do not straightforwardly map onto the historical development of many sign languages. Recent approaches in sign language historical linguistics are highlighted and future directions for research are suggested to address the problems discussed in this review.

The Ghazal as “World Poetry”: Between Worlding and Vernacularization

AbstractWhile the ghazal has appeared in many linguistic traditions, its diversity is undermined by the imposition of a singular definition of this genre, which is further compounded by the overly simplistic identification of ghazal as lyric; these lyricized readings of the ghazal as both transhistorical and transnational rely on a discourse of “worlding” as an imperial project of cultural recovery and homogenization. In contrast, this article employs the methodology of historical poetics to argue via a reading of meta-ghazals in Persian, Urdu, and English that reading practices around the ghazal—including definitions of the genre that variously emphasize form versus theme—change according to the historical and geographical context of its circulation. However, by celebrating the ghazal’s travel as seemingly apolitical and/or ahistorical, the discourse of world poetry, particularly in the reception of the ghazals of Agha Shahid Ali, participates in an ongoing imperialism in world literary study. In contrast, we can read the ghazals of Adrienne Rich as exemplifying the tradition of vernacularization that has enabled the ghazal’s movement between languages, such that her work, like the work of historical poetics as a methodology, honors the history of the form’s travel through its appearance in contemporary American English.

Метафоризация лексики, принадлежащей концептуальным сферам ИНДУСТРИЯ и КОМПЬЮТЕРНЫЕ ТЕХНОЛОГИИ (на материале английского биологического научно-популярного дискурса)

The article considers how the conceptual metaphor functions in biological popular science English discourse. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the correlation between the target domain represented by all branches of Biology (biological popular science discourse) and the INDUSTRY and INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY source domains by examining a plethora of metaphoric expressions constituting them. By using continuous sampling method, as well as methods of conceptual and component analysis, the author considers metaphorical expressions which constitute the source domains. This paper analyses the lexical units from English and American popular science articles on Biology in order to identify the conceptual grounds which underlie the conceptual mappings between the target and source domains. In this paper we combine the approaches of Russian and Western linguistic traditions (Chudinov, Lakoff). The modern approach to metaphor, developed in the beginning of the 20th century and combining the embodied and communicative approaches (B. Hampe), is also examined. The works of the Russian linguists dedicated to the linguistic picture of the world (V. Maslova, N. Zanegina) are covered as well. The data (2 410 metaphorical expressions) confirm that the majority of the secondary meanings developed by the lexemes under analysis show a sharp contrast with their primary (basic) meanings. The obtained results prove that the metaphoric expressions belonging to the INDUSTRY domain seem to be less frequent in comparison to the INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY source domain, which allows to build up a detailed thesaurus and a large number of contexts. Furthermore, the results help to discover that the most common target domains to describe this type of discourse happen to be cells, fungi, plants and some genetic material. This can be explained by the close attention to the most imperceptible processes that happen on the molecular level.