History of the Study of Imitative in General Linguistics

The history of the origin of imitative has ancient roots. People have been interested in imitations since ancient times. Not only linguists, but also even philosophers, psychologists, to one degree or another at different times, have addressed the problem of sound visualization. Imitative vocabulary helps to increase the imagery and emotional expressiveness of the word. However, due to its complex nature, for some time, linguists of various languages did not conduct serious research on the linguistic functions of imitative words. However, they are often found in oral folk art and fiction, giving these texts artistic and poetic meaning, expressiveness, imagery, artistic power and accessibility, liveliness and dynamism, all this has led, now, to the fact that linguists began to pay close attention the study of this unusual group of words. Тhey are divided into types, separated into a special part of speech, they are used in the formation of new words, they act as members of a sentence.

The origins of the shape bias: Evidence from the Tsimane'

In the US, children often generalize the meaning of new words by assuming that objects with the same shape have the same name. We propose that this shape bias is influenced by children’s exposure to objects of different categories (artifacts and natural kinds), and language to talk about them. We present a cross-cultural study between English speakers in the US and Tsimane’ speakers in the Bolivian Amazon. We found that US children and adults were more likely to generalize novel labels by shape rather than by material or color, relative to Tsimane’ participants. Critically, Tsimane’ children and adults systematically avoided generalizing labels to objects that shared no common features with the novel referent. Our results provide initial evidence that the relative exposure to objects of different kinds and language to talk about them can lead to cross-cultural differences on object name learning.

Between Proper Name and Appellative: Lexicography of Words with Borderline Status (Exemplified by Neologism Brexit)

The problems of lexicography of new words that appeared in the Russian language in the 21 st century are considered based on the materials of the upcoming thematic Explanatory Dictionary of Unity and Enmity in the Russian Language of 2000–2020. The author of the article is one of the dictionary compilers. It is stated that the difficulties of describing new borrowed lexical units, that are at the stage of usage, are associated with the establishment of their lexical, grammatical and stylistic characteristics. Criteria for their determination are proposed. The principles of choosing the variant of heading word spelling in a dictionary entry are argued. Based on the methods of definitional, linguoculturological and content analysis using textual material extracted from mass media resources, a methodology for compiling a dictionary entry has been developed, which makes it possible to give a detailed description of the lexical, grammatical, stylistic, paradigmatic and pragmatic characteristics of current borrowings. As a result of this technique application, a dictionary entry of Brexit neologism is presented, reflecting the unstable position of this lexeme in the Russian language system, the status of which fluctuates between a proper name and an appellative. The material and methodology for its systematization can be considered when compiling explanatory dictionaries of new words in the Russian language.

(Non)pandemic Youth Speak. On Lexical-Semantic Tendencies in the Polish Language of the Youth

This article presents the latest lexical tendencies in the language of contemporary Polish youth. The directions of the dominance of certain meanings were analysed on the basis of the submissions for the Youth Word of the Year contest (2020), as well as the online slang dictionary miejski.pl. The data obtained comes from natural users of the language and is based on their linguistic awareness and intuition. Dominant semantic fields were distinguished, namely human, interpersonal relationships, attitudes towards life, cultural preferences, etc. Coining new terms in these areas is accompanied by expressiveness, humour, and playing with language norms. Despite the occurrence of new words connected with the Covid-19 pandemic, they have not been widely represented among those lexical and semantic units considered interesting and worth mentioning.

Neologismen in Coronatijd – een steekproef

In times of crisis language is often enriched with new words called neologisms. After all, extraordinary circumstances call for new words. This also applies to the corona crisis. For example, the Dutch have had to deal with the anderhalvemetersamenleving and other corona measures. Moreover, the crisis has caused a lot of “corona damage”, both economically, psychologically and physically. The vaccination campaign has set the stage for a return to normality. This route also provides necessary neologisms. This article takes a look at which neologisms were used on one day in a particular newspaper. Since most neologisms consist of compound nouns, the sample will focus on these only. The De Volkskrant online edition, dated 16 April 2021, will be used for this purpose, using the articles obtained after entering the search term corona. After a short introduction to neologisms and the different types of compositions, the neologisms obtained are then categorised according to different composition categories and according to corona themes. Finally, a conclusion is drawn based on the results obtained.

Increased cognitive load during pseudoword processing

Pseudowords (words without semantic meaning) are often used as a control condition in linguistic cognitive experiments, with the expectation that such words, unlike real words, do not activate higher cognitive processes in the brain. However, other theories assume that pseudowords are perceived as new words, leading to an even higher cognitive response. The aim of this study was to investigate the cognitive load of processing a pseudoword by observing event-related potentials in a 3-stimulus oddball paradigm using real target words, real non-target words, and pseudowords as oddball stimuli. The results show a clear task-related P3b triggered by target words, but also a prominent P600 component triggered by pseudowords, indicating difficulty in the classification task due to unknown words. Surprisingly, N400 was decreased for pseudowords compared to target and non-target words at the locations where P3b and P600 were observed, suggesting that task-related effects might inhibit other aspects of cognitive processing. These results could lead to better understanding of the components that may overlap temporally and topographically, and to the more precise control of different cognitive generators involved in event-related potential experiments in pseudowords.

REDUPLICATION PROCESSES IN TURKISH AND GERMAN: A CONTRASTIVE STUDY

The main goal of this study is to analyse the reduplicative structures in two languages: Turkish and German. Unlike German, Turkish is known as a language that actively uses productive reduplicative structures. There are different functions of these structures. They can be employed to produce new words in some languages or they can add different meanings to the existing words. They are mostly divided as partial and full reduplication. Also, some of the reduplication processes are productive, which means they can be used with new words unlike unproductive reduplication which can only be used with some specific words in that language. This study is a contrastive study and this requires three steps in the study: description, juxtaposition and comparison (Krzeszowski, 1990: 35). In the description step, the features of reduplication are defined and reduplicative processes in Turkish and German are described. In the second step, juxtaposition, the common ground to be compared in two languages are stated. At the end in the comparison step, the differences and similarities regarding reduplicative processes in two languages are determined related to type and degree. In terms of degree, both languages have full and partial reduplication. On the other hand, German has more types of reduplicative structures compared to Turkish. When two languages are compared regarding type, it is possible to state that German reduplicative structures are mostly unproductive, which means those structures are generally lexicalized or idiomatic expressions and do not allow for new words unlike Turkish.

Completing WordNets with Sememe Knowledge

WordNets organize words into synonymous word sets, and the connections between words present the semantic relationships between them, which have become an indispensable source for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. With the development and evolution of languages, WordNets need to be constantly updated manually. To address the problem of inadequate word semantic knowledge of “new words”, this study explores a novel method to automatically update the WordNet knowledge base by incorporating word-embedding techniques with sememe knowledge from HowNet. The model first characterizes the relationships among words and sememes with a graph structure and jointly learns the embedding vectors of words and sememes; finally, it synthesizes word similarities to predict concepts (synonym sets) of new words. To examine the performance of the proposed model, a new dataset connected to sememe knowledge and WordNet is constructed. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the existing baseline models.