A Contrastive Study of Deontic Modality in Parallel Texts

This article is a contrastive study of deontic modal markers in three parallel texts. It analyses the modality system in the English, Russian and French texts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights accounting for the ambiguity of some English modal verbs in legal texts and the difficulty in rendering them into a different language. The research reveals modal markers used to express deontic permission, deontic obligation and deontic prohibition in the three parallel texts; semantic similarities and discrepancies between these modal markers; and translation strategies employed to render the English modal markers into Russian and French. The article responds to the need for a systematic analysis of deontic modal markers in English, Russian and French due to the semantic and syntactic differences among the German, Romance and Slavic languages. The article concludes that French and Russian have more in common than French and English or Russian and English in terms of the deontic modality.

When Language Transfer is Negative

This paper analyses morpho-syntactic interference errors committed by learners of French as a foreign language in four Tanzanian universities: UDSM, UDOM, DUCE and Makumira. The paper has three specific objectives: (i) to identify morpho-syntactic interference errors, (ii) to account for their sources and (iii) to recommend a corrective treatment. The study included a total of 61 respondents. The data was collected through learners’ written texts in French from which a corpus was developed. The study was guided by the interlanguage theory and the error analysis approach. Data analysis was qualitative. The findings reveal that errors included the use of nouns with English origins (18.87%), omission of prepositions (36.79%) and absence of determiners (44.34%). The findings further show that these errors are due to previously acquired or learned languages: Swahili, ethnic community languages and English. Different recommendations are given following the findings. As regards the use of definite and indefinite articles in French, teachers should provide a guided reading of different French texts through which learners will be able to understand how articles are used. To master the use of prepositions, teachers should encourage learners to read a variety of texts in French as this can make them understand and internalize the different prepositions. Moreover, through regular exercises on word formation in French, learners may be able to familiarize themselves with French nouns, hence internalizing their forms. Finally, the learning of French nouns should be done in context.

Indirectly Named Entity Recognition

We define here indirectly named entities, as a term to denote multiword expressions referring to known named entities by means of periphrasis. While named entity recognition is a classical task in natural language processing, little attention has been paid to indirectly named entities and their treatment. In this paper, we try to address this gap, describing issues related to the detection and understanding of indirectly named entities in texts. We introduce a proof of concept for retrieving both lexicalised and non-lexicalised indirectly named entities in French texts. We also show example cases where this proof of concept is applied, and discuss future perspectives. We have initiated the creation of a first lexicon of 712 indirectly named entity entries that is available for future research.

The Miroir des dames in Fifteenth-Century England

This article outlines the circulation and readership of a continental French text called the Miroir des dames in England during the fifteenth century. Three surviving manuscripts can be connected with England: one belonged to the Duke of Bedford, another to Henry VII, and a third was created in England and copied from Bedford's manuscript. Documentary evidence indicates that at least two further manuscripts of the Miroir circulated in England. These manuscripts and references demonstrate the continued reading and copying of French texts in England among a select circle of bibliophiles.

Le roman médiéval d’expression française dans les anciens Pays-Bas entre 1550 et 1600

In recent years, the dissemination of medieval-inspired French texts through the printing press has received renewed attention from the scientific community. This research has shown, inter alia, that the Gutenberg revolution, although considered to be one of the thresholds of modernity, did not sound the death knell for the Middle Ages. On the contrary, the medieval legacy found an opportunity to perpetuate itself for several decades through this new medium. My own work in this field has made it possible to point out that the caesura of the years 1530-1540, often put forward as a moment of rupture with the literary tradition of the Middle Ages, was not as abrupt as some might have thought, at least in Hainaut. In the case of the former Low Countries, many areas still remain unexplored. This is notably the case for the production of medieval romances in French during the second half of the sixteenth century, which I propose to examine. This particular period is all the more interesting to study because it lies between the supposed rupture with the medieval literary tradition of the mid-16th century and the renewal brought about by the 17th-century publishing phenomenon known as the ‘Bibliothèque bleue’. An analysis of the titles printed between 1550 and 1600 and their peritexts, as well as the material examination of these editions, will contribute to a better understanding of this complex publishing phenomenon, navigating between ‘old romances’ and ‘new language’.

French translations of “Eugene Onegin”: on the conveyance of stylistic patterns

This research is dedicated to the topic of multivariate translations. Leaning on the text corpus that contains 16 French translations of A. S. Pushkin's novel “Eugene Onegin”, analysis is conducted on the peculiarities of conveying certain characteristic stylistic patterns in French texts alongside other stylistic techniques of the original, as well as changes in translations depending on the poetic form chosen by the translator. The selected extensive material trace traces the evolution of translators’ approach towards the stylistics of Pushkin's text over time. The article focuses on the chapters III and VIII of the novel. Comparative analysis demonstrates the dependence of the stylistic aspect of translation on the poetic form chosen by the translator. Prose translations provide more accurate stylistic equivalents than translations of the verses. Poetry translations are divided into two groups: 1) accurate compliance with the of Onegin’s verse; 2) departure from the rhyme pattern of the original. The frequency of transmitting stylistic techniques of the original in both groups does not demonstrated significant systematic differences. The author determines the consistencies in conveying certain stylistic patterns in various French translations. Periphrases, comparisons, inversions, and metaphors most of the time receive stylistically accurate equivalents in all translations; while metonymy and polysyndeton with conjunction “and” do not. The scientific novelty lies in examination of the text corpus that contains virtually all existing full translations of the novel “Eugene Onegin”.

Verbal representation of kinemas in the lexicography and space of a literary text (based on the material of Russian and French literature of the XIX–XX centuries)

This article analyses the verbalization of kinemas: the choice of ways and means of their verbal representation in literary texts and dictionaries. Russian -Russian and French-language literature of the 19th and 20th centuries of different genres (dramatic, epic (novels, novellas, short stories, detective stories, plays), as well as Russian-French explanatory dictionaries) were used as the material for the study. The authors used the following contexts: descriptions of verbal representations of kinemas, extracted from modern and classical Russian and French-language literature of the XIX–XX centuries. The analyzed material in lexicography allows us to draw the following conclusions: the frequency of verbalization of the kineme in the Russian language with the reference word "eyes"(250; 45%); in the French language, the most frequent are kinemas with the reference word "hand" (154; 34,2%). The study of modern and classical fiction gives grounds to state that in French texts the frequency of verbalization of kinemas containing a description of gestures is 40%, in Russian texts 30,7%. The most representative are complex RRCS in Russian fiction — 42,4%, and in French texts there is a clear predominance of verbalization of kinemas containing a description of facial expression — 44,2%. It should be noted that the national speech behavior of an individual is determined not only and not so much by his psychological mood and communication conditions, but by his belonging to a certain linguistic and cultural community, which has its own cultural space, cultural interior of the situation, and all this is consistently reflected in the literary text.

Non-Prototypical Structurally Separate Conditional Constructions in Catalan (In Comparison with Spanish and French)

The article is devoted to non-prototypical structurally separate conditional constructions (NSCC) in Catalan in comparison with Spanish and French. These represent two (or more) separate sentences, one of which expresses condition and the other – consequence without conditional conjunctions. The relevance and novelty of this study follows from the fact that NSCCs have not received sufficient attention yet which is particularly true for Catalan. There is no consensus in specialist literature as regards the terms used to describe this kind of constructions or define their scope. The list of terms for NSCCs in Russian linguistics is too long, and includes the following: “non-prototypical constructions”, “conditional constructions formed as a “syntactic unity”, “supraphrasal unity”, among others. The paper states that it’s necessary to distinguish prototypical conditional constructions from the constructions with conditional con-junction “si”, on one hand, and non-prototypical constructions, on the other. And integral conditional constructions should be distinguished from structurally separate constructions (also referred to as formally separate). There are also non-prototypical structurally separate conditional constructions with interrogative words expressing condition in the protasis and imperatives constructions expressing consequence in the apodosis, constructions with imperatives (verbs like ‘suppose’) expressing condition in the protasis and interrogative sentences expressing consequence in the apodosis. NSCCs can use different moods: imperative, indicative, subjunctive, and conditional. Imperative forms are compatible both with semantics of conditions and consequences. There are also NSCCs without imperatives. And besides that, between the first sentence expressing the condition and the second sentence expressing the consequence filler utterances can occur. As typically in prototypical conditional constructions, in NSCC the condition and the consequence expressed also belong to the same subject of speech (speaker), though in some rare cases may be inserted, as a link be-tween the first and the second sentences of the construction, an interrogative sentence asked by another subject. NSCCs don’t allow the use of subordinating conjunctions, the opposite being a clear sign of prototypical constructions, but the consequence can be introduced with markers meaning ‘then’. The study is based on the texts by Catalan authors, excerpts from Catalan journals and their translations into Spanish and French; texts generated by the author’s informers, native speakers have also been used.

fsca

This article reports on an open-source R package for the extraction of syntactic units from dependency-parsed French texts. To evaluate the reliability of the package, syntactic units were extracted from a corpus of L2 French and were compared to units extracted manually from the same corpus. The f-score of the extracted units ranged from 0.53–0.97. Although units were not always identical between the two methods, manual and automatically-derived syntactic complexity measures were strongly and significantly correlated (ρ = 0.62–0.97, p < 0.001), suggesting that this package may be a suitable replacement for manual annotation in some cases where manual annotation is not possible but that care should be used in interpreting the measures based on these units.

Visualizing Reading Practices in the Late Middle Ages: Images in a Book of Hours Held at Memorial University

This article studies the images and the Latin and French texts in a Book of Hours of Premonstratensian Use held at Memorial University Libraries. While the Annunciation scene in Books of Hours has been the subject of numerous studies, the Pentecost scene representing Mary reading to the Apostles has received limited attention in research. The article assesses the meaning of these images and their possible connection to reading practices in late medieval Europe.