Continuidad y discontinuidad en la transmisión de las palabras patrimoniales competidas por arabismos: oliva y aceituna, olio y aceite, olivo y aceituno

Continuity and Discontinuity in the Transmission of Spanish Inherited Words Competed by Arabisms: oliva and aceituna, olio and aceite, olivo and aceituno. The loss and replacement of Arabisms by Latin loanwords was a frequent phenomenon between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries; the opposite movement, the replacement of an inherited word by an Arabism is far less frequent. Oliva, an inherited word, is competed by the Arabism aceituna; currently the common name for the fruit in the Hispanic world is aceituna, and oliva has a restricted use to the phrase aceite de oliva or to refer to a colour. Similarly, the inherited word olio will be replaced by aceite, and with a specialized meaning will be eliminated by the euphuism óleo, its etymological doublet. On the other hand, olivo prevails over aceituno and represents a special case of continuity in this lexical family. The research will be carried out in two directions: first, I will analyse the old academic dictionaries and other specialized dictionaries and glossaries from the fifteenth-twentieth centuries. Second, I will conduct a corpus analysis, based on the diachronic corpora available for the Spanish language. This study will try to answer the questions how? and why? of these neological movements of vocabulary. Keywords: inherited words, Arabisms, oliva, aceituna, lexical substitution

Variation and change in idiolects: Tracing a lexical substitution inside a psychiatric hospital around 1900

This paper presents a case study on the lexical substitution of Wärter (‘guard’) by Pfleger (‘nurse’) in records from a southern German psychiatric hospital around 1900. Its goal is to shed light on language variation and change from the perspective of idiolects. Therefore, I analyse how this change, implemented by official documents in 1876, spreads ‘from above’ into the written language of 108 patients and 10 family members. The results show a quick implementation of the new variant, comprising its semantic generalization and the near-complete replacement of the older variant. This process can sometimes be observed in individual lifespan changes, while other writers continue using Wärter in idiosyncratic ways. Finally, a comparison with two more general corpora (DWDS and Google Books) shows that this lexical change appears delayed and less consistent outside the hospital context.

ALaSca: an Automated approach for Large-Scale Lexical Substitution

The lexical substitution task aims at finding suitable replacements for words in context. It has proved to be useful in several areas, such as word sense induction and text simplification, as well as in more practical applications such as writing-assistant tools. However, the paucity of annotated data has forced researchers to apply mainly unsupervised approaches, limiting the applicability of large pre-trained models and thus hampering the potential benefits of supervised approaches to the task. In this paper, we mitigate this issue by proposing ALaSca, a novel approach to automatically creating large-scale datasets for English lexical substitution. ALaSca allows examples to be produced for potentially any word in a language vocabulary and to cover most of the meanings it lists. Thanks to this, we can unleash the full potential of neural architectures and finetune them on the lexical substitution task. Indeed, when using our data, a transformer-based model performs substantially better than when using manually annotated data only. We release ALaSca at https://sapienzanlp.github.io/alasca/.

A French corpus annotated for multiword expressions and named entities

We present the enrichment of a French treebank of various genres with a new annotation layer for multiword expressions (MWEs) and named entities (NEs).1 Our contribution with respect to previous work on NE and MWE annotation is the particular care taken to use formal criteria, organized into decision flowcharts, shedding some light on the interactions between NEs and MWEs. Moreover, in order to cope with the well-known difficulty to draw a clear-cut frontier between compositional expressions and MWEs, we chose to use sufficient criteria only. As a result, annotated MWEs satisfy a varying number of sufficient criteria, accounting for the scalar nature of the MWE status. In addition to the span of the elements, annotation includes the subcategory of NEs (e.g., person, location) and one matching sufficient criterion for non-verbal MWEs (e.g., lexical substitution). The 3,099 sentences of the treebank were double-annotated and adjudicated, and we paid attention to cross-type consistency and compatibility with thesyntactic layer. Overall inter-annotator agreement on non-verbal MWEs and NEs reached 71.1%. The released corpus contains 3,112 annotated NEs and 3,440 MWEs, and is distributed under an open license.

LEXICAL SUBSTITUTION IN PHRASES DIFFERENT LANGUAGES

The article analyzes the lexical substitution in phrasemes of different-structured languages, considers the points of view of well-known phraseologists on the nature and mechanism of variance in the sphere of phraseology, gives examples of phraseological variants in Russian, Tatar, Kazakh and German.

Variations sur les expressions figées : quelle(s) traduction(s) chez les apprenants?

This paper analyses the translations that French undergraduate students come up with when they are to deal with fixed expressions (FEs) in English that have been modified morphologically, syntactically, lexically or semantically. FEs in English are not always used in their canonical form and are often modified in the media for contextualization purposes or stylistic reasons. They can be modified by lexical substitution, lexical insertion and by lexical and semantic inversion resulting in distinct expressions with a different sense.The paper reveals the sources of mistranslation and the pedagogic means to deal with them based upon this specific type of translation exercise. Two types of FEs are taken into account: FEs in the target language sharing all or parts of the lexical constituents with those in the source language and FEs with no direct equivalent in French. The study can also have a more general impact on translation methodology as a whole: mistranslation analysis of FEs demonstrates the difficulties students have in recognizing and/or in adapting the translation of FEs according to their modification and their context. Translating FEs could therefore be used as a first methodological step in initiating students to the specific problems of translation as a whole.

PECULIARITIES AND DIFFICULTIES OF TRANSLATION OF PROFESSIONAL PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC VOCABULARY FROM GERMAN INTO UKRAINIAN

This contribution focuses on the professional psychotherapeutic vocabulary, its origin and development in Ukrainian, and, more specifically, on the significant influence of German concepts on the development of relevant professional vocabulary in Ukrainian. It identifies a number of specific features of such professional vocabulary, such as clarity and attachment to the profession, that is, the embedment of professional terms in a specific terminological system and their readiness for professional use. The quality that differentiates such terms from other subjects, concepts, or processes is accuracy. The vertical gradation of communication of speakers in the psychotherapeutic process, which involves internal communication of professionals with each other, communication of professionals with non-professionals, inter-professional communication, is explored. The development of relevant terminology, its dissemination and derivation from the source language into the recipient language, the impact of the source language on the recipient language, and the rules that such newly formed words comply with are analysed. Specifically, such derivation is possible in the form of transliteration, calquing, or partial derivation, and the translator may resort to the lexical substitution technique, that is, replace individual lexical items of the basic lexeme in the recipient language. The article further describes the specifics of professional vocabulary and the attributes that are common with and different from general vocabulary and explains the role of the translator in the psychotherapeutic process. Potential difficulties and typical mistakes that may arise during such translation are discussed, and ways for overcoming these difficulties are suggested. It also describes the adequacy and equivalence of translation, where adequacy refers to the source and final texts with reference to the purpose of translation.