Dirty hands: Bribery in Russian anecdote

The study of the speech-genre and formal-semantic properties of Russian anecdotes on bribery is based the corpus of anecdotes, which also include jokes of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, differing from Russian ones only in the names of the “protagonists” appearing in them. It is established that the main means of creating a pun in a joke are the lexical and grammatical polysemy and homonymy, playing off the phonetic similarities and spontaneous humor. The comic effect in jokes on bribery can also be created by playing off idioms – their literalization or replacement of components. According to the corpus of anecdotes, the authorities act as an almost “exclusive” subject of bribery – officials of all ranks, police authorities and lawmakers. In the corpus of jokes on corruption, the axiological and praxeological aspects of bribery are traced clearly: the general attitude of society towards a bribe and its assessment. The research claims the ubiquity of bribery in power structures, and with regard to the miraculous disappearance of corruption, one can feel extreme pessimism as it is ineradicable and inescapable. Humor as the ability to notice the ridiculous side of someone or something and present it in a maliciously mocking form in the corpus of jokes on bribery is practically absent due to the domination of sarcasm and irony. In jokes, all the denunciatory pathos is directed at bribe-takers, towards whom there is hatred, impotent rage and hyperbolic cruelty. The “fight against corruption” is purely imitative, but it has several non-fictitious functions: a tool for reprisal against competitors and those who do not fit into corruption schemes. Among socio-cultural functions of the jokes on corruption, in addition to the entertainment function, the article identifies the cathartic-therapeutic function, aimed at relieving a psychological stress caused by the prevalence of bribery, and the aggression function, specified in the outrage by corruption.

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Boundedness of verbal and adjectival predicates in Mandarin

LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts ◽

10.3765/exabs.v0i0.3012 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Charles Lam

Keyword(s):

Formal Semantic ◽

Measure Phrases ◽

Semantic Properties

This study extends the boundedness account for ba-construction in Mandarin to transitive comparatives and hypothesizes that the selection in ba-construction and transitive comparatives constrained by boundedness, where boundedness can be manifested in terms of telicity of VPs, quantization of internal arguments or measure phrases.This generalized account shows how formal semantic properties affect syntactic selection and explains some sentences that existing accounts do not. Also, the proposal implicates a homomorphic syntax-semantics mapping across V and A categories, which is superior than category-specific theories.<div> </div>

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Ensembles and the Formal Semantic Properties of Mass Terms

Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems ◽

10.1007/978-1-4020-4110-5_18 ◽

1979 ◽

pp. 249-277 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

H. C. Bunt

Keyword(s):

Formal Semantic ◽

Mass Terms ◽

Semantic Properties

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Evidentiality and Formal Semantic Theories

The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198759515.013.15 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 285-312

Author(s):

Margaret Speas

Keyword(s):

Semantic Theory ◽

Formal Semantic ◽

Semantic Variation ◽

The Core ◽

Core Meaning ◽

Semantic Properties ◽

Insight Into ◽

The Way

This chapter reviews recent proposals about how the meanings of evidentials should be captured within formal semantic theories, which attempt to model compositional meaning in a way that gives insight into possible semantic variation. The literature surveyed addresses three questions. First, how should the core meaning of evidential morphemes be characterized and what sorts of information can be inferred from their use in particular contexts and hence does not need to be specified as part of the core meaning? Second, can the way that evidentials compose with the rest of the sentence be captured using existing formal tools, or do evidentials have semantic properties that motivate additions to our semantic toolkit? Third, is there a limit to the range of possible evidential meanings? If so, how can a formal semantic theory constrain the possible meanings?

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Analyzing progressives in Norwegian

Nordic Journal of Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s0332586507001758 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 30 (2) ◽

pp. 185-208 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Ingebjørg Tonne

Keyword(s):

Formal Semantic ◽

Corpus Study ◽

Parallel Corpora ◽

Parallel Corpus ◽

Semantic Properties

In this paper, the Norwegian progressive forms are examined by way of a corpus study, including both a monolingual corpus and a Norwegian–English parallel corpus. The corpora reveal patterns and properties of Norwegian progressives that are novel compared to those of a well-studied aspectual system like that in English. The study shows that the progressives should be grouped into two subgroups, according to their combinatorial and semantic properties. The array of properties that is brought out by the examination of the monolingual and parallel corpora is accounted for in a formal semantic frame, based on works by Dowty (1979) and Krifka (1992, 1998), and also drawing on insights from, among others, Rothstein (1999, 2004).

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