City Place Names and their Modification in Child Speech

The anthropocentric focus of contemporary linguistic research highlights the specificity of individual linguistic worldview which includes a personal sense of toponymy. The studies discussing the ways that toponymic concepts are apprehended, memorized, and retrieved from memory are usually based on experimental data. But looking at irregular changes that toponyms may receive in individual speech is no less informative. Children’s speech proves the most valuable source for this, since it is less bound to the language norms of everyday communication, which makes the modifications more distinct. The author uses a collection (more than 170 items) of St.-Petersburg toponym modifications from children of 3–11 years old, drawing some conclusions about the peculiarities of their auditory perception (the role of individual frequency, phonemic and supra-phonemic word features in building semantic awareness, the specificity of phoneme patterns recognition by children and the processes of etymologizing and rethinking the internal form of the word), memorizing and storing information (the study of the child’s vocabulary connections and semantization of words including proper and common nouns; making up words and grammatical forms in the course of their multiple reproduction). Analysis of this real-life data brings clarity over some structural and functional aspects of individual linguistic systems and their speech manifestations. The information obtained can be used for creating child’s speech, memory, and attention training programs, as well as for studies in local history.

Advances in Semiotics of Translation: A Model of Text Analysis and Comparison for Literary Translation

Unlike other text types, literary texts offer signs with semantic diversity and several reading modes to the reader through different genres. Translation of literary texts puts them through cultural circulation across the world. Translators, incurring the responsibility of the original texts, pondering on the ways to overcome the pitfalls, and bringing the translated text to readers’ service, undertake a challenge to succeed in the initiative for this circulation. In the book’s foreword, Sündüz Öztürk Kasar draws attention to this point and clarifies that the act of translation admittedly alters the direction of the text it deals with, evolving it into another world of language and culture. Translation also reveals the meaning of the original text that has not been realized in the target culture’s linguistic and socio-cultural context but conceivably expecting to be discovered between the lines. According to Öztürk Kasar, that is the reason why translators should be more sensitive to the signs than anybody else is and have linguistic and semantic awareness.

Detecting Semantic Anomalies

We critically appraise the recent interest in out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and question the practical relevance of existing benchmarks. While the currently prevalent trend is to consider different datasets as OOD, we argue that out-distributions of practical interest are ones where the distinction is semantic in nature for a specified context, and that evaluative tasks should reflect this more closely. Assuming a context of object recognition, we recommend a set of benchmarks, motivated by practical applications. We make progress on these benchmarks by exploring a multi-task learning based approach, showing that auxiliary objectives for improved semantic awareness result in improved semantic anomaly detection, with accompanying generalization benefits.

What do children know about German verb prefixes?

Not much is known about how children cope with the task of acquiring the complex, polyfunctional, and often abstract and idiosyncratic system of German verbal prefixes. This paper presents an experimental study on children’s knowledge, i.e. their morphological and semantic awareness, of the five verbal prefixes be‑, ent‑, er‑, ver‑, and zer‑ in preschool age and early school age. The experiment combines a decision and a definition task involving canonical and novel prefix verbs, and it examines the influence of context on the recognition of the verbs. The results of the study show that, in general, the knowledge of prefix verbs increases significantly between 6 and 8 years. Preschoolers have preliminary, but still very labile representations of the five verbal prefixes, school children have established much more independent representations, however, the lexical knowledge they have about prefixes and prefixed verbs is still fragmentary. The five prefixes under investigation differ considerably with respect to their morpho-semantic transparency. Higher transparency results in good passive knowledge of the prefixes, even when they are rarely used by the children spontaneously, such as the infrequent, but semantically salient prefix ent- (ent-kommen ‘escape’), that is much better known to children than spontaneous speech data would suggest.