O modularności reprezentacji i procesów umysłowych (w języku i nie tylko)

Pojęcie modułu i modularności, często używane w aktualnym dyskursie naukowym, dotyczącym m.in. reprezentacji językowych i procesów ich przetwarzania, jest bardzo szerokie. W niniejszym artykule podjęto próbę rozgraniczenia różnych spojrzeń na modularność i odpowiedzi na pytania: Czym jest moduł? W jaki sposób można identyfikować moduły umysłowe i ustalić ich funkcjonalne relacje między sobą? Jakie problemy wiążą się z przyjęciem modularności reprezentacji umysłowych bez równoczesnego przyjęcia modularności ich przetwarzania? On the modularity of representation and mental processes (in language and beyond) Summary: The notion of module and modularity, used frequently in contemporary academic discourse that is related to linguistic representation and language processing, is rather broad. In this paper, an attempt has been made to differentiate between various views on modularity, and to answer the following questions: What is a module? How can we identify cognitive modules and establish their functional interrelations? What problems might arise from assuming the existence of the modularity of mental representations, without simultaneously accepting the modularity of their processing?

Verbalization of the Concept of “Kysh” (Winter) in the Karachay-Balkar Language Picture of the World

This article discusses the concept of kysh (winter), which is one of the main elements of the concept sphere of the Karachay-Balkar language picture of the world. The national and cultural specificity of the concept under study is revealed on the basis of various works of art, phraseological units, proverbs and sayings, as well as dictionary definitions. The paper presents the semantics of the lexical units that make up this concept, reveals its conceptual features based on various associations of native speakers, analyzes the linguistic representation and cognitive characteristics of this concept in the Karachay-Balkar language picture of the world, and therefore considers paremiological units that represent the ethno-cultural specifics of the Karachay-Balkar language, features of the ethnic worldview and world perception. The main distinguishing features of winter, attributes, and accompanying factors are considered.

Verbal representation of monster’s image in works for children of modern Ukrainian authors

The article investigates the peculiarities of the linguistic representation of monster image in modern Ukrainian children’s literature. The literary discourse of fear and monster image is presented. From the communicative-pragmatic point of view, the traditional, usual images of monster, in particular Babay and Chupacabra, are compared with their counterparts from the works of such popular Ukrainian writers. New images of the monster, the appearance of which was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, are characterized. The purpose of the article is to investigate the peculiarities of the linguistic representation of the image of monster in modern Ukrainian children’s literature. The following research methods were used: linguistic observation and description of language phenomena; method of decoding an artistic text, analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, as well as the method of continuous sampling. It is established that in the works for children of modern Ukrainian authors the image of a fearless, good monster is gaining popularity, which testifies to the tendency to improve traditional negative images. To create «updated» images of monsters, writers use a range of language tools and stylistic devices. The individual author’s onyms for monster and occasional sign tokens are particularly expressive, which appear during the creation of these images. It is observed that the image of monster in children’s works implements a number of pragmatic functions: cognitive (acquisition and assimilation of knowledge about the world (about the world of things; about the world of human relations); developmental (enrichment of the child’s vocabulary, formation of reading skills, development of imagination, critical / creative thinking, cognitive interest, etc.); educational (formation of basic moral principles, learning patterns of behavior, etc.); entertainment (enjoyment of artistic communication). The study of the usual and occasional in the linguistic representation of fear and monster in the works for children of modern Ukrainian writers complemented the knowledge about the connection of the writer’s worldview with the works’ language and with the national linguistic picture of the world.

A novel linguistic decision-making method based on the voting model for large-scale linguistic decision making

The notable characteristic of large-scale linguistic decision-making problems is that there are so many decision makers who provide linguistic assessments by using fuzzy linguistic representation models. In real-world applications, fuzzy linguistic terms mean different things for different people, and linguistic assessments based on different linguistic representation models may be simultaneous in the same large-scale linguistic decision-making problems. To this end, a novel linguistic decision-making method based on the voting model is proposed in the paper to deal with multi-linguistic assessments provided by decision makers. In large-scale linguistic decision process, evaluation-based voting is defined and multi-linguistic decision matrix is designed to represent multi-linguistic assessments provided by decision makers by using different linguistic representation models, and properties of the decision matrix are analyzed to show that linguistic assessments based on different linguistic representation models can be simultaneously represented. Based on multi-linguistic decision matrix, a new linguistic decision-making framework is developed to deal with large-scale linguistic decision-making problems with multi-linguistic assessments, in which normalization of multi-linguistic decision matrix and trust degrees of linguistic terms are contained, and more important, based on trust degrees of linguistic terms and 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic aggregation operators, an uniform fusion method of multi-linguistic assessments is proposed to aggregate multi-linguistic assessments of large-scale linguistic decision-making problems. Finally, user experiences of shared bikes, which are a large-scale linguistic decision-making problem in real-world applications, are employed to show the new decision-making framework and the uniform fusion method of multi-linguistic assessments, and furthermore, compared with existing linguistic decision-making methods analyzed in the example, it seems that multi-linguistic decision matrix and the uniform fusion method are useful and effective tools to deal with large-scale linguistic decision-making problems with multi-linguistic assessments.

Gender asymmetries in ellipsis: An experimental comparison of markedness and frequency accounts in English

Bobaljik & Zocca (2011) argue that ellipsis reveals the existence of (at least) two classes of gender-paired nouns: in the actor/actress class, the grammatically feminine form is specified for conceptual gender, while the unaffixed form is unspecified, exemplifying the classic markedness asymmetry (Jakobson 1932); in the prince/princess class, both forms are specified for conceptual gender. Here we test two theories of this asymmetry: one that encodes markedness in the linguistic representation (e.g. Merchant 2014, Sudo & Spathas 2016, and Saab 2019), and one that traces the asymmetry to differences in the relative frequency of the forms in each pair (Haspelmath 2006). The frequency approach predicts that the size of the asymmetries (as quantified by acceptability judgments) will correlate with the size of the relative frequency ratio for each pair. We test this prediction in two experiments: the first is a curated set of 16 pairs in English, and the second is a test of 58 pairs that nearly exhausts such pairs in English. We use frequencies from COCA (Davies 2008) to test the prediction of the frequency approach. Our results suggest that the relative frequency hypothesis is not an empirically adequate competitor for the explanation of gender asymmetries.

Humour and other catastrophes: dealing with the translation of mixed-genre TV Series

Starting from a trend observed in the Italian dubbing of US series “Six Feet Under” (Bucaria 2005; Bucaria forthcoming) involving the deletion or toning down of most instances of potentially disturbing elements, this paper will take into consideration examples from three US TV series (“House MD,” “Nip/Tuck” and “Six Feet Under”) dubbed into Italian and presenting a mixture of drama and comedy, in an attempt to analyze the degree of manipulation or adaptation that they underwent in terms of the linguistic representation of clashing genres. With particular reference to the rendering of humorous comments produced in unexpected contexts, the analysis shows considerable manipulation in the translated versions and a consequent decrease in the humorous content of the target texts.

Conceptual reconsideration of nominations of limbs in the paremiological fund of the Chinese language

This article is dedicated to reconsideration of nominations of limbs reflected in the phraseological fund of the Chinese language. The goal of this work consist in determination of the conceptual attributes of nominations of human limbs in the Chinese linguistic worldview by analyzing their linguistic representation in the paremiological fund of the language. The author leans on the vast theoretical material, gradually describing the key approaches towards the analysis of “bodily concepts” and the study of phraseologisms of the Chinese language in the conceptual paradigm. The author reveals several primary and secondary meanings of words that represent limbs in the Chinese language, demonstrating the interrelation between the origin of the word and the number of its secondary conceptual meanings. For example, the hieroglyph 脚 (foot) is the “youngest” and most commonly denominates part of the body. The article also proves the possibility of actualization of cognitive meanings of particular linguistic concepts through the analysis of paremias. Namely, the concept “arm” implies the meanings of “mastery”, “distance”, “tool” and “weapon”, while the concept  “foot” – the meanings of “foundation”, “motion”, “prosperity”. The author comes to the conclusion that the ways of reconsideration of human body and its parts in descriptive and comparative terms of different cultures is one of the most effective instruments for cognizing the fundamental of the linguistic worldview.